Sounds like you are all busy 'hunkering down' your plants for winter. Down here we are just planting and getting up to speed.
We had a circus of a day in the school garden today. When the first class of kids, 4th graders, came out to the garden the bunny was actually in attendance! What an excitement that was, you can imagine. The kids effectively put the fear of you-know-who into little Peter Cottontail and he squeezed through the picket fence and high-tailed it for the bushes.
Then we discovered one tomato plant with zero leaves left on it and a couple of big, fat tomato hornworms munching on the smaller stems. Again, what a thrill for the kids to see, and we picked them off but saved them for the other classes to see. There were 7 huge hornworms in all that we found on the plants in the garden. I brought them home and fed them to my local bluejays - that would have been a great thing for the kids to see, too!
We also encountered fire ants in our compost heap, luckily
I think I was the only victim of a bite. Plus there were whiteflies on the pepper plants. Kindergartners planted some sprouted potatoes, red, gold and purple ones in all. (I bought a mixed bag of colorful potatoes and sprouted them in my cupboard at home) You should have seen the big eyes on those little kids when I said that potato was sprouting a whole new plant. Hope they get going! We had a brief cool front last weekend but it's back to tropical again now.
