How Does My Garden Grow, You Ask?

So we've got one of the hottest Austin summers on record happening here, and as I type this, the dark storm clouds seem to be happy just providing shade and not actually providing water. I feel like I'm living a Sting song.

But nonetheless, I continue to attempt to cultivate my small garden patch. Dan helped me create the vertical supports so that I could train my mini-pumpkin and winter squash vines to grow up. The pumpkin is on the left and the winter squash is on the right in this picture:

Despite it's smaller size, the winter squash is beginning to bloom. I think these flowers will eventually become squash, but I have no idea how long until that happens.

For the record, I did grow the squash from seed, but all the other plants in the garden were bought as fledglings. I tried starting an eggplant from seed this month, but it's been over 2 weeks and nothing has sprouted so I might have to cheat and check out the nursery offerings this weekend.

Oh yeah. And all the cups and trowels and junk in my garden is my white-trash way of trying to keep the neighborhood cats from using my garden as a litter box. Yuck!