Dwarf Pawpaw & Gopher Tortoise

 

Mature dwarf paw paw 'tree'... Height waist high to chest high.

Loaded with fruit this year... But tiny!

 They're starting to drop... I pick them up and eat... plant seeds in pots. I tried planting seeds in flower garden a number of years ago when I got a few fruit... Unfortunately none came up...

I may need to try scarification.

Fruit on regular tree is still hard...

So bizarre watching gopher tortoise eating cnidoscolus... Aka "7 minute itch". I wouldn't want to try it...

Just brushing against cnidoscolus stimulosus feels like getting attacked by fire ants... and if unlucky enough to scratch irritated skin, may continue to scratch for the rest of the day!

Imagine getting a mouthful of that! But I see the tortoises browsing the plant every summer!

Actually, I may have some idea of how a mouthful of  cnidoscolus might feel...

I had a mouthful of fire ants yesterday... Pretty funny, grabbed a handful of potato chips from the bottom of bag, popped in mouth without examining... Had to pick fire ants off my tongue using mirror!

Hot and dry

 The rains stopped... the weather turned hot... 

Not a surprise, the rains this spring were the unusual weather...

With the end of the rain, and the near constant heat, came the fun of portaging water from the rain barrels and attempting to keep a few plants going...

And... the deer fence started getting tested as the desperate critters wanted something to eat that wasn't crunchy...

Pear tree...

Pepper plant...

Maxixe vine

A few of the plants being consumed by mother deer...

Incidentally.... I saw the spotted fawn she stashed in the woodland, inside the deer fence...

Feels kind of bad needing to fence them out... But, I have the fence to protect a little bit of my efforts...

Mulberry stump

Mulberry posts...

The birds planted a lot of mulberry trees everywhere I put in gardens... So plenty of post materials...

Cut down a mulberry tree, and it grows right back, so I get multiple posts from the same tree.

There were a number of areas where the weight of the vines (muscadine, Carolina jessamine, smilax) made the fence vulnerable... 

so... cut the vines off the fence... add new taller posts, additional fencing above the original... Tie the two fences together with some twine...and cross fingers.

Here's some pics from before everything turned crunchy...

Broken colour 4 o'clock

Yellow echinacea (paradoxa)

American lady and echinacea purpurea

Daisies and Kniphofia

Rudbeckia hirta

I didn't have the heart to take pictures of the brown strawberry plants or the dying carrot bed...