The winners in the latest garden photo contest

Many excellent garden photos have been posted at the Gardening With the Monitor group site on Flickr. Our first contest earlier this summer focused on general plant photos. The second one, which ended earlier this week, targeted vegetables.

Joanne Ciccarello, the Monitor's photo editor, was the judge. She chose two images as the best.

The first photograph above was taken by Jayne Hanlin. She explains its background:

I took a cruise on the Yangtze River in July and snapped this photo in a little town near Fengdu, China. Although there were many people in the market area, I knew I had to capture this woman’s wonderful smile as she carried her vegetables.  I’ll never know if she was going to sell them or use them to make dinner.

The second winning photo (click at the bottom right of the first photo) was taken by Sarah Oliver, who says:

I took the photo on one of my days off on the organic farm where I'm currently working: Next Step Produce in Newburg, Md. I don't have much time to take photos of the farm while I'm working (my hands are always wet or muddy, and there's just no time), so I like to walk around on my days off and take pictures of the vegetables, to have a record of the progression of the seasons during the time I've been working here. On this particular day, I took a bucket with me because I wanted to harvest some peas, and the green of the peas was so pretty with the red bucket.

For her prize, Jayne will receive a copy of "Patio & Stone, a Sunset Design Guide," which includes an interactive DVD.

We'll be sending Sarah, who's shortly moving to Maine, a copy of "True Blueberry: Recipes for Soups, Salads, Desserts, and More."

Congratulations to them both -- and to all who entered.

The next contest? We'll be looking for photographs of fruits. So find your best shots of summer's blueberries, peaches, plums, etc., and get out your camera to take some stunning shots of early fall apples. Post them at  Gardening With the Monitor before Sept. 30, 2009, and you could be the next winner.

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