Last night, a massive storm system passed over us. In parts of the province, there were tornado warnings.

Here, we had rain.

Finally.

It started to rain somewhere around 2am, and didn’t stop until about 7am, and we might still get more, later.

For all the watering of the gardens we’ve been trying to keep up on, it couldn’t match last night’s deep soak, and it really showed!

We now have several of the self-sown, tiny sunflowers under the platform bird feeder with seed heads opening up.

The pumpkins had been starting to bloom for a while, but I was only seeing the odd male blossom here and there. This morning, there was an explosion of flowers and new buds, and…

Our very first baby pumpkin.

This is on one of the first pumpkin plants that sprouted. I found a second one, on the mound that took so long to sprout one of the 5 seeds planted in it, that I had begun to think none would come up there.

We’ll keep an eye on them to see how many more begin to develop, then select one or two on each plant to keep growing. It’s still highly unlikely they will have a chance to fully ripen, but who knows; we might have a long and mild fall this year.

The big sunflowers have been pretty remarkable.

More and more seed heads are developing, which I would expect with these ones that are well above my head.

There are others that are quite a surprise.

This is one of the deer damaged sunflowers. You can see the dark spot in the middle, where the original top of the plant had been eaten off. Two branches have now developed into stems, and have their own tiny seed heads starting to develop among the new leaves.

Which is impressive, but this next one shows resilience at a whole new level!

You can see, lower down, where the original top had been eaten off. Of the two new stems that developed has also lost it’s top, and basically all the leaves have been eaten off – and yet there it is! A seed head, developing among the tiny cluster of new leaves.

How absolutely remarkable!

The Re-Farmer