Gardening and photo class!

Its been so long for a gardening post, so sorry! Lots of trial and error, lessons learned, stupid bugs, argh! Well, the garden is hanging in there. I’m struggling with hornworms eating up my tomatoes. Moths come and lay eggs in your bed, then hornworms appear. Wasps eat the hornworms, and I think that’s why I’m having a slight victory over them. I haven’t seen too many tomatoes eaten lately.

Vinca is an awesome flower for the desert, wow! Does great in super heat.

We’ve been doing good with the peppers!

The remaining lot of Hawaiian tomatoes. When the heat reached triple digits, I learned that I wasn’t watering them enough. So I increased more watering, but for too long (20 minutes) and killed some plants. Argh! Oh well, next year. Yet, we’re still having blossoms grow and produce fruit in the intense heat. That’s never happened before, because I grew the wrong variety for the desert. Woo hoo!

This is what your tomato plant looks like after hornworms have moved in…

….and do this to your fruit. Die, infernal alien beast! Don’t like these bugs, can’t you tell:)

Yet, we’re still getting some tomatoes, just not as much as we’ll get next year.

Peppers with lovely verbena flowers on bottom.

Cherry tomato plants are still massive and tall!

The grapevine is doing its best crowded out by the cherry tomatoes. Note to self, don’t plant cherry tomatoes in same bed as grapevines!

But the superstar of the garden is the basil. Holy buckets, that thing grew huge! It started so small, and got so bushy. I was having a heck of a time with spittle bugs laying their white foamy junk under the basil leaves. I sprayed the plant with the tomato lady’s “Die Bug” spray, and it worked to get rid of that. Doesn’t work for the hornworms.

Basil crowding out the chives.

Cherrys, ahh. I LOVE my 1.8 lens! The blur, ah, I love it!

Lantana, after being sprayed with the ‘amazing kelp’. Huge!

Now, this was last night. I’ve been attending Jeanna Haye’s photography class with sheer ecstatic joy. One, because she’s the one that inspired me to get cracking in this business 2 years ago, and two, its my second chance at college somewhat, getting educated from a teacher in this topic. I’m the only nerd that shows up to class with a digital recorder. I don’t want to miss a thing in notes!

Last night was the “Masters of Lighting” class. Lighting is everything in photography. I considered this class priceless education. Subject placement, time of day, and more. Jeanna took us out at the sunset, and taught us how to get sun flare shots. Tons of girls with big, dream cameras, with one lone guy, brave soul:)

Our ever so kind teacher!

FIRST attempt ever at doing this! As the sun came out of the clouds, we scrambled to practice and get the shot. See the pole coming out of his head? That’s a tangen, and you don’t want those, but there were so many people in the one area to get the shot, so oh well.

I have SO much to learn on sunflares, but it was cool to take my first one. Hope to do more of these in the future. Sunset is the greatest time for taking pictures!

My photo pal, Cortni:)

So, I have the Photoshop class and the field trip this week, and then I will be so sad that the classes are over, but forever grateful for the experience. I can’t wait to apply everything I’ve learned, and go shoot for fun some more!

Thanks for reading here, and sharing in my passion. Gardening rocks, and I just love taking pictures, its so addicting. Hope everyone is having a great week:)