Enough for dinner!

Or at least, enough to contribute.

They are tiny, grape-size, taste like summer.

I have only planted tomatoes (red and yellow and roma and others), peppers (several kinds), pumkins and courgettes/squash this year (as well as herbs). Last year's lettuce and rocket zoomed from shoots to bolted overnight: the early-summer, hot-and-humid climate is tough. But the tomato plants are flourishing so far this year, huge, like rain-forest vines, bejewelled with little green spheres and ovoids that are beginning to turn yellow and red.

Smiling flowers

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Garden theme: blue, purple, orange, yellow

It just turned out this way!

Patience, patience: hollyhock!

There is something immensely satisfying about growing hollyhocks from seed. The first year, they are just small, round-leaved plants that snails and slugs love to turn into lacy doilies. The second year, they stretch to the sky and flower with childhood memories of grandparent's gardens.

This year, last year's first white hollyhocks are flowering tall behind the tomatoes. I've planted a bank of crimson ones for next year, but I suspect the cat and her local cronies have put paid to some of those. Also a multicoloured packet of seeds... and now I can't remember exactly which babies are where!

And then this year's flowering hollyhocks will provide seed for next year's juveniles.

There are lots of seeds in a packet of hollyhocks. Plant them all, you'll be sure to lose some to the legless things, cats, etc., but the ones that survive will be magnificent.

Summer evening

Colours of a skein of hand-dyed merino wool, that maybe one day I'll knit into something... or maybe it's just to look at and enjoy, like this.

And now the moon is lighting up the bay: silver water, dark horizon, deep sky.

Daylily, Mexican style (tigridia)

One of about fifteen, from a 5$ box of bulbs bought at King Kullen. The flower is about five inches wide. I hope it lasts longer than a day!

Early-morning visitor

He was browsing the clover next to the barbeque. Shell about six inches long. Mouth full and chewing. Beady eye watching. Ready to run, surpisingly fast.

Summer!

Clematis climbing the wall. There's another one, deep purple, but it hasn't reached as high as this one yet.

Fuschia in the shade under the bridge from the deck to the lawn.

Now where is that tow truck????

Baby ospreys at Osprey Park

High up on the nesting platform, in a bed made of not twigs, but large branches, are at least two baby ospreys. One parent stands guard, occasionally rearranging the nest, lifting and moving the branches with its foot, not its beak. The babies play-fight and then hide down in the nest out of sight.

Both parents fly in circles around the nest when a neighbor, not heeding the signs, walks their little dogs too close. Their warning song is loud.

Mastic Beach Village Exploratory yard sale today!

At the headquarters on Neighborhood Road!