Summer                                                                  Hiroshima Moon

Kate and I spent time working in the garden this am.  I plucked out extra beets, collard greens and chard.  Getting a second round of all these underway.  The tomatoes have grown fat, tall and filled with fruit so I got out the plastic tomato handcuffs and cuffed separate stalks to the red metal supports.  Barring a drop in temps (unlikely, eh?) we’ll have a big tomato harvest.  The leeks and potatoes continue strong, dark green.  Both of these develop out of sight, as do the carrots, but the above ground leaves and stems give good evidence of their overall health.

Kate put out water for the bees while I was gone.  A neighbor called and said she had a lot of dead bees in her bird bath.  Not sure it was due to lack of water but it never hurts to add water for them.  I forgot that when I moved them into the orchard.  It’s looking like  this will be a non-honey harvest year which means I’ll have to do the work to  overwinter these colonies, something I did not want to do anymore.   Ah, well.  So much for that management idea.

Kate does a wonderful job of keeping our garden beautiful by fighting the good fight against weeds and other invaders.  She is, as she names herself, “a ninja weeder.”