Any day you can eat veggies from your garden is a good day.  My garden is small, but plants love it here, so they usually get big and produce well.  This is getting to be a good year for gardening in this area.

I’ve been sharing cucumbers with lots of different people, after we always have enough for ourselves.  Two plants are big and rambling and producing so many cucumbers!

Tomatoes seem slow to ripen this year, but there are plenty on the plants, and I have to keep tying the plants up again.  I grow these purple cherry ones for my daughter in law, but she can’t eat them as fast as they produce, so I always have some of them to share.

Several years ago I got big red sweet peppers from a farmer’s market and didn’t know then if they were a hybrid or heirloom, so I saved some seeds.  Heirlooms! Now I’ve grown them again the last 2 years.  Mmmm.

We went on a trip down to the beach and I brought back an Eastern Shore cantaloupe, supposed to be the best there are.  Threw the cut up skins and the innards into the compost bin.  OK, so when some germinated and grew, I left them there, and now there are female flowers with tiny melons. Ya gotta love volunteers.

Not a great picture, but I saw this guy on a dried hollyhock this morning.  It’s not the 17 year cycle here this year, so there aren’t many, but even a few singing in the trees in the evening is such a good sound of summer.

I have 2 little entertainers  in the yard, all over the place; a pair of catbirds, and I’m having fun observing them. They have a nest 10′ outside my back door, in a row of roses.  They get braver as time goes on, sometimes letting me get within a few feet of them, and sometimes coming within a few feet of me.  They seem to know that I’m “that same human” and that I have made no attempt to hurt them, scare them,  etc.  They’ll swoop down and go right up in their nest, not concerned that they’re giving the location of the nest away.  A couple days ago there were 2 other people with me on the back porch and then they were much more cautious, hanging around a few minutes and checking us out before they went  in the nest.  They are both very busy birds now, going in the nest all the time with bugs, feeding babies. Yesterday the babies were making some small peeping sounds and I peeked in and saw a couple little upturned beaks. I love to watch them splashing  all around, enjoying a bath in the bird bath, right near their nest.

The beauty of summer, the blessings of growing food from the good earth, nature and wonderment all around. Enjoy the rest of your summer!