Summer Is Flying By

Chocolate Sunflower

I hope you are having a nice week. Today the weather man said we have had 31 days over 100. I wouldn't be getting these flowers or tomatoes. I would like a few summer storms though. Fire is all around. I had thought I would make it up to see the rugs at the ATHA Hooker Hill Rug Retreat this week, but I ended up not going because of the terrible fires up there. Maybe next year. I would love to see Monica Jones in person. So I worked in the kitchen.

This week I picked this bushel basket of tomatoes.

Aren't they pretty?

I spent the rest of the day turning the tomatoes into this sauce.

 

It really is a all day project. Cooking the tomatoes, onions and pepper and garlic until I can put it through my
food grinder. Then back on the stove to cook two, or more hours and then finally getting into the jars after it has cooked down and then in the water bath canner for 35 minutes. I make such a huge mess, by the time my kitchen is finally cleaned that takes a while too. I was pretty tired yesterday. My tomato vines are still loaded with tomatoes so I hope to repeat this a few more times before summer is over.

 

My flowers are still producing and most of my zinnias are multicolored so I thought this was interesting that this plant has nothing but purple blooms.

 

Most of them look like this. That purple bush is in the background.

I was out with my camera. I normally have a hard time getting pictures of the orchard bees when they are on the sunflowers. I got this series of three photos that made me so happy. I would like to share them with you.

The first photo, I was afraid to get much closer. They fly away at the point normally.

I took the next step, and see how her little pollen baskets are filled to overflowing?

 

 

I took one more step and got that last picture. She flew away at this point. 

 

My sunflowers are growing so fast and the finches are already chattering up a storm, as they wait for the
sunflower seeds to harden. I found this sunflower already in the process of being opened by the finches.

The finches take the brown stuff off and watch and check on the progress just as I keep checking the fruit on the peach and nectarine trees. I noticed yesterday that I have a male finch with his red summer colors on his chest and face starting to follow me around when I am outside. Finches chatter almost non-stop. Even when they are alone. The male was flying ahead of me tree to tree. By the end of summer the trees and sunflowers will be filled  with a large flock. I will have to race them if I am to get a few seeds to plant.

This summer we have some pretty large ant hills. The kind with giant red ants. I have always been intrigued by those kind of ants. I like to stand and watch them as they carry giant seeds or bits of straw or even parts of other dead bugs back to the ant hill. I like them because I always think I will get an ant farm and then have a steady supply of ants. Don't mess up and get them from another ant hill that you think might have been the same kind. Its results in horrible results. I had one in my kitchen when the kids were younger and lets say, I am still scared by what I saw. I haven't ever had one again so I am content to watch them outside.

Earlier in the summer, I don't normally have my pest control guy spray out in the garden, but we have these box elder beetles that really get bad so I have him go back out there and spray the trees that the box elder beetles live on.
As I was walking ahead of him, I hear him remarking to himself, " Wow!! What a big ant hill!!" He is just spraying the heck out of those poor ants. I wanted to cry. Every time I walk by that ghost town of an ant hill. I am reminded why I don't let pest control out in the pasture. I have found that mulching and fertilizing has done more for my pest control than any thing I have tried in the past.

 That is my animal and bug stories for the day. I think there are so many dramas being played out every day and I never even write about half that I see on a daily basis. Like this year, we have so many of those tiny dragon fly looking things that are from ant lions. They are what are pollinating my tomatoes. I think it is because we have had such a wet winter, and of course, the ant hills.

Its never a dull moment. I have been hooking but not as much as I wish. I hope you have a delightful weekend.

~Kim~

 "The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is changing into autumn – the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change."

―E.B. White, Charlotte's Web