The great outdoors around Lalaith Havens

 We've had some nights dipping down close to or below freezing, so Dada and I had to hightail it to the garden and rescue everybody who looked like they had potential:

I love this creamy mum out front!

Liam's yellow tree, in morning light.

Zinnias and marigolds. They're very brown and crispy and sad now. I did snip some to dry out and save seeds, though. I noticed at least one bumblethunderbeast who preferred the deepest dark pink ones. I wonder how that works; do they have daily assignments? Do they have favorites? Do they just land on whatever is close? I'm very intrigued. The cute little white butterflies liked the marigolds. These plants are supposed to deter critters from the actual garden plants, but the tomatoes all grew like blazes while these flowers took their sweet old time coming up and took forever to open. I only saw toads and one chipmunk in the garden this year, though we did have a banana thief. Did I already talk about that? We read somewhere that butterflies like ripe bananas, so Dada made me a wire banana hanger and Damon and I hung it on the corner of the garden. We keep an eye out but saw zero butterflies on the banana. Then one day the banana completely disappeared. No peel, no nothing. We repeated the experiment several times throughout the summer and many bananas disappeared. Now I want a trail camera because we either have a team of incredibly buff, nocturnal butterflies who work together to spirit it away, or a raccoon or a weasel is shimmying up the pole and stealing our bananas. Either way I want to see it!

My one lonely bell pepper. All the rest of them had big rotten spots on them. Our jalapeños did very well, but not these guys. You can see how petite he is!

I did see my very first coyote trotting along in this field in the middle of an afternoon (not in this picture). We've heard them, but I'd never spotted any in the "wild", haha, and I was pretty excited to see one!

Okay, you guys, when I go seed-crazy roundabouts February, remind me that I don't need any more than two red currant plants! These guys are so prolific I can't keep up. I had four this year. They're adorable and yummy and cheerful and there's gazillions of them but they are labor intensive to pick and the majority of them rotted on the vines because I couldn't get to them in time, despite eating bajillions!