Blackberries, beans and ... come on tomatoes!

I can always tell when G is picking blackberries... the quiet morning air is punctuated with yelps. She is a brave and greedy woman. I think in terms of annual harvest, she's gotten roughly 3 pints so far. Add vanilla ice cream and oh my!!

G's new batch of hot weather grass coming along. [Hot?! You bet.] Next to it, the raised bed seems to have disappeared under mountains of tomato vine. The mountain of plant has mountains of fruit, but it seems to be taking 30 years to ripen. Which begs the question: Roughly how long does it take for a cherry tomato to go from flower to dinner table? We had our first salad out of the raised bed Saturday [lettuce and a couple of precious apparently early tomatoes]... very tasty. Something is attacking the Bok Choy. ?! Hey, that's mine! Oh, and I caught one more tomato horn worm. Hate to kill them; they are so handsome. But voracious. Ruthless. Rapacious. They can strip a plant in no time. And speaking of rapacious, the battle against squash bugs continues. Seem to find several a day still. Yesterday afternoon there were 3 on one of the cucumber plants. They had nearly killed it in the space of 24 hours. Granted the plant was small and young, but--24 hours!

I added some extra strings for the beans to climb. We decided they needed the hub cap [not pictured] to ornament their spot. I have been enjoying them enormously. (Akin to watching paint dry?! No. I just like sitting and looking at them. I can't really imagine what they'll do, to be honest.)

Last bits of garden news? One of the pickling cucumbers has a baby--the size of a gherkin. Sooooo cute. And one of the green pepper plants does too--currently bigger than a pea but smaller than a marble. Monarch visiting: this huge handsome butterfly likes G's Echinacea flowers; he or she bobbles by a couple of times a day, just to brighten things up. Yesterday Gloria was standing nearby and he/she swirled right around her head! Delightful to be that close to it. We have also seen a large tiger-hued butterfly... G looked it up but I don't remember what she told me it was.

We had a lovely rain Friday morning, by the way. But nothing since. The clouds gather along about late afternoon, tease us a little, then rush over to the mountains. (The rich get richer, right?!)