It's a lovely summer day... complete with the sounds of nail-guns and saws across the street where they are framing the two new houses that will be diagonal from us. I'll be very glad when the framing and roofing and siding are done and the bulk of the noise moves inside... which will probably be sometime in October.

I've started harvesting tomatoes. Caitlyn especially likes the orange cherry tomatoes and will eat them non-stop if I let her. Strangers are so impressed that she "willingly eats tomatoes!" She also eats carrots pulled right out of the ground and green beans off the vines. Cook any of this and she's less likely to enjoy it so visibly.

Yesterday was warm enough to run the solar oven... so we now have tiny sun-dried tomatoes. I just put perhaps a half-quart of beans in the freezer. We are still eating our little alpine strawberries, maybe a cup a week. I once explained to someone that there appears to be a fixed number of strawberry seeds per berry; alpine strawberries just don't have the same surface area of the strawberries you get celo-packed from Watsonville. They are super-sweet, though. There are two actual pumpkins growing, and a plethora of pumpkin flowers. I picked our first pepper today, a petite red thing that the eating of will be Ian's responsibility. And I really should remember where the bathroom scale is stored and weigh the box of potatoes in the pantry (it's a little more than half what I expect the total harvest to be).

Perhaps it's time to take the "wannabe gardener" off my About page...