First harvest

or,

THE $95 CHERRY TOMATO 

Our garden has produced food.  The fruits of our labor have finally ...erm...borne fruit.

There are a lot more of these on the way.  It's a good thing I've lined up three families to take tomatoes of my hands, because I'm going to have huge numbers of them on my hands in a short while.  I'm afraid I picked this one a few days early.  It was just a touch green, and when I ate it, it was a little sour.  But it was delicious.  

We also have a green pepper ready to go, any time I want to pick and eat it.  We re-planted green beans, in the hopes that they would sprout before the frost.  The package said to expect sprouts in 7 to 14 days; in 3 days, 90 percent of our seeds had sprouted.  It's AMAZING.  They have flowers, like three weeks later.  Hopefully they get enough sun, as the days get shorter.

Effing mosquitoes.

At the beginning of June, one of our local TV weatherpeople was answering questions from viewers. (I heard about this second-hand. I have no use for our local news. It's just like the national news, only smaller and more depressing.) Someone e-mailed in, "Why are the mosquitoes so bad this year?" The weatherperson responded, "Excellent question. The worse the moisture is, the worse the mosquitoes are. The average rainfall for this time of year is 4 inches [or something like that; I don't remember the exact numbers]. So far this year, we've had 13 inches of rain." That was like 8 rainstorms ago. The mosquitoes are, for the first time in my life, keeping me indoors. 

People say that fish eat them.  So I can't REALLY declare genocide on them.

So I'm adding to my wish list a mosquito trap. I think the plan this year is to suffer through August and September and possibly October, at which time the mosquitoes will winter. I'm going to hang a bat house, so it's ready to go next late spring, when the bats are looking for new places to live.  And early in the spring, I'll buy a mosquito trap.  (Current finances don't permit such a major investment.  Those things are expensive. If there were any justice in the world, giving out mosquito traps to anyone who wanted one would have been part of Obama's stimulus plan.)  So while this year, one of the wettest years in recent memory, will continue to be a misery, we should be well prepared for next year.  When we're likely to have a drought, and a mosquito shortage.

My new favorite machine

What possible purpose could this serve, except to kill zombies?

Pole chain saw