How does your garden grow?

Little surprises seem to have sprung up overnight in my little garden.

My first eggplant is slowly filling out and little buds hold promise of other little eggplant siblings down the line. After talking with the woman who runs my CSA farm, I'm trying a variety of home remedies for the flea beetles - right now it's soapy water. She also recommended dusting the plant with flour or baby powder. Or her preferred method is simply to let the weeds grow around the plants so that the beetles eat the weeds and not the plant. Not sure I want a weedy garden, but it may come to that!

The extra moisture from spraying the eggplant seems to have created the ideal environment for little colonies of mushrooms. These look like pale jelly fish floating above the dirt.

In other news, my backyard neighbor seems to have taken it upon himself to tackle my "weeds" along the now invisible fenceline and eradicated my sunflowers and the lilac plant I bought at the Lewis Ginter plant sale back in May. I'm so sad about the lilac. I am really, really hoping that it battles back. I've now built a little mulch/stick/rock fence to make it very clear that 'this is your yard space and this is my yard space'. I know he meant well, but eesh!

Oh, and I saw a little garden snake slither away when mowing my lawn last night. It is wrong that I find snakes fascinating? And they are certainly welcome in my garden!