Time to plant or time to....wait?

I have seed packets burning a hole in my gardener's pockets, all but dancing up and down in their eagerness to be sown (or so sees my slightly overheated mind's eye).

And I have been reading about other gardeners getting beds ready and sowing their lettuce seeds in anticipation of cooler weather to come.

And I WANT to get mine started...but.....then there's Ike.Ike, a category 4 hurricane at the moment is forecast in many models to hit Houston late Saturday as either a category 3 or 4, depending on how it strengthens (or not) in the very warm Gulf waters. The 5 day cone currently projected shows that our area might just be inundated by rain in a few days, which makes me hesitate.

While I'd love my seeds to be kept moist with some gentle rains, I am concerned that torrential rainfall would just make a muddy wash out of my designated lettuce beds.

So. I'm going to play a bit of a waiting game. I pulled out tomatillo plants and trimmed back tomatoes and will work in compost and ready a couple of bedding areas for my lettuce seeds.If the rains don't come - then surely a few extra days closer to cooler weather won't set me too far behind in the gardener's game.

In the meantime, I am enjoying the obedient plants as they are hitting the peak of their blooms,and rock stars like the eggplant,and hoping the trimming I did today on my salvias will translate into another good set of blooms before winter knocks them back to the ground.

As the summer grinds to a close, it is as often patterns visible more than actual blooms that catch my eye. Here are a few of my recent favorites.

The skeleton of a tomatilloKalanchoe leavesMoses in a boat that came up through a knothole in a boardWeather patterns are really running hot and cold this year. It remains to be seen if the Central Texas area will get pounded by Ike, or merely watered.

Gardening is always a gamble. I'm betting on the house this go-round and will bide my time.