A Fruitful Morning

This morning was one of those cool, crisp, summer dawns that seem to only appear to those that have the tenacity to wake up before the sunrise. We started the day together at 4:30 am, both of us piling into the pickup with our fresh coffee and heading to a friend's house to pick up a truck. Today, Eric is out busily felling trees with fellow compadres as part of the fire department's fuel reduction work (this is code for removing trees and shrubs too close to remote cabins, thinning timber, and clear-cutting lanes for the bomber pilots to use as a good area to lay down fire retardant strips).All of the wood felled during the day is chipped and hauled to whomever in the county wanting it as garden dressing or animal bedding. Since I have gone from chainsaw work to light-duty stuff on a 4H-wheeler to not joining the group at all (to repeat a theme...*Sob*), I felt the need to tag along on the morning drive back and forth from the house to gather equipment. It was a beautiful start to the day - although we could have done without the local wildlife displaying itself right on the highway!

Remember our post about the garden? After painstakingly fertilizing, watering and praying to the garden gods, it looks like we are about to be up to our ears in a late crop of tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, peppers and pumpkins. "The Beloved Pumpkin" has changed dramatically from his modest start in the Folgers Coffee can. I will also not hesitate to ask anyone for squash recipes (although baked with butter and brown sugar is a fav) since the plant is possibly one of the most productive little guys I have ever seen. We went from saying, " What the heck is the matter with this thing...were is the fruit?" to "Oh MY! Whatever are we going to do if ALL of those ripen?" Not a bad problem to have though! The literally hundreds of volunteer sunflowers on the yard perimeter are also performing well - you can see the two largest ones in the picture below. The others are quite midget-like, which makes for easy and guiltless picking.