What hilarity! Love the fun posts, and learning a bit about y'all in the bargain. For those who have ever read my few posts, I'm the clueless one, the transplant subset. If there's subsets of subsets, I would be the transient transplant. I spend my life following my spouse's work, geographically speaking. I pack houses, and unpack. I accumulate all manner of flower pots and containers, then downsize, give away, and move again. My gardening efforts are full of hearty enthusiasm, as well as serial plant murdering (I like to blame it on local plant ignorance and not my PJIC disease, *plants jump into the cart*). Since we never get to live in one place long enough for either the humans or the plants to put down deep roots, we transient transplants collect any and all plants fervently, via swaps, pinching starts at public malls and other venues, and the local garden center. Then, we moan and groan about disposing of our pot ghetto when the next move is announced. Transient transplants spend way too much time covering up and disguising the objectionable architectural features of our current rental digs. We creatively hang plants, put up fishing line trellises to cover up nasty window views, and annoy the neighbors with our homemade garden accessories, obtained in pre-dawn trash-day scrounging. These charming accents (yes, even the old commodes planted with petunias), feed our collector (#6) genes, which we fervently nurture upon arrival in our latest garden planting zone. We don't consciously try to be specialists (#7s), but once we latch onto a type of plant that we don't kill in the newest climate, we grow it in every color known to the species. Oh, and yes, we have even been known to dumpster-dive in #2 and #4's trash bins, where the plant pickings are amazingly healthy, lush, and green. We transient transplants have become experts at covertly watching your work through our mis-matched window coverings (read - sheets), knowing there's gonna be really good pickings in YOUR trash this week. This serves to help our garden budget go further, knowing we must fill up our pots and fronts of landlord's planting beds to overflowing in such a short period of time, before we have to frantically put it all back, to get ready for the next household moving cycle. When the next move is announced, we lovingly dig up, label, package, and mail starts of all these frantically planted pot ghettos to our Northern friends, for safekeeping until we get settled into our next digs. In actuality, our Northern plant recipients can't even remember our names, or why they are receiving these care-packages of dirt and mushy, frozen green blobs, resembling a refrigerator science experiment....

That's a beautiful series of photos of your catbirds, Jane. They look like a garden ornament perched atop the shepherd's hook. We have catbirds. Their catlike calls are one of the few birdsongs I recognize. Mr Tunnels! Ha ha! Great name! Claire, your dragon looks wonderful in his new tri-colored metallic coat of scales. In addition to being the summer of the trees here, it also is shaping into another summer of the birds, even more so than last year. The house finches have babies in last year's swallow nest on the outside ledge under the porch roof. I think the female is building a second nest in the nestbox inside the porch while Dad cares for the first batch of babies. The barn swallows meantime are feeding little ones in the original ancestral swallow nest inside the porch. And, oblivious to the nesting birds, the hummingbirds are constant visitors to the nectar feeder hanging from the eaves. All these different birds, and others (goldfinches and occasional Baltimore orioles) perch on the branches of our crabapple tree in the front yard, and they look like brightly colored jewels amidst the pink blossoms. I really need to take some pictures with a better camera. In the barn, a pair of tufted titmice have refurbished their nest from several years ago and are in some stage of rearing little titmice. They are supposed to be cavity dwellers, but I guess their nook up in the eaves is close enough. Their nests are such delicate affairs with moss siding, like filigree. Perhaps the nicest surprise is that I have a pair of tree swallows nesting in my birdhouse, on the sawed-off utility pole out in my "orange garden." I had boarded up the entry hole to the house in frustration during my battle with the English sparrows. Since I hadn't seen an English sparrow in several years, I cautiously unblocked the door, hoping for bluebirds or tree swallows, and my wishes were rewarded. With the birds in residence on the porch, I scheduled the house painting until August or September, explaining to the head painter that his guys could just take down the nests prior to painting because the birds would be gone then. He asked "Do you want us to try to remove the nests so they can be put back up?" I replied, "No... demolition!" His somewhat relieved reply: "Ah demolition! That's a word I understand!" LOL! It made me laugh! These birds are master carpenters. They will rebuild next year from scratch, I've no doubt.

At our house, the harvest is hot and heavy right now. We have potatoes and onions curing everywhere, on every flat surface available. Today I'm going to start slicing and chopping onions to freeze for later use in cooking, and then the rest of the first batch of cured onions will go into tubular net bags for storage. The second onion batch needs to cure for at least another week and then they'll get the same treatment. I'm going to send 10 or 20 lbs. of onions and the same amount of potatoes to work with DS on the next day he works, which I think is Thursday, because I've promised his fire station chef a steady supply of fresh veggies. I am picking tomatoes about every other day, and we have more than we can handle at this point, which is a great problem to have. I don't think it will continue to be such a great tomato year for too many more weeks though, because our temperatures are well above the range at which flowers set fruit.) We need a cold spell here. By cold, I mean any weather with highs only in the low 90s and lows in the low 7os. We have enough tomato fruitset that I think we'll be harvesting all we can handle through mid-July but am not sure what we'll get after that. Yesterday we were down in the metroplex shopping for a few hours and we dropped off two Wal-Mart bags of tomatoes for DS's crew at the station which generated a lot of excitement among them, and saved me from having to do any canning yesterday. (I didn't have time.) On Sunday afternoon I put up 8 quart bags of green beans in the freezer, and I'm going outside in just a few minutes to pick beans again. I was hoping it would be nice and cool this morning, but our low temp for the night was 80, so we're starting out kind of warm already and the sun isn't even up yet. Yesterday morning we harvested the early sweet corn, which was the variety 'Early Sunglow'. We got about 75 good ears and a few bad ones that either had been 'sampled' by the raccoons, had poor fertilization because of the heat or something else that resulted in unusable ears. I gave the bad ears (less than a dozen total) to the chickens who were delighted with them, and put the rest in the refrigerator. We ate some fresh last night and will have more today, and I am going to blanch and freeze the rest this afternoon. Some years the raccoons get all the corn, and there's rarely a year in which we beat them to all of it, so I'm very happy with our harvest. I hope we're able to get as many ears from the mid-season corn and the late-season corn, but we'll be fighting both the coons and the corn earworms and European corn borers, so who knows what we'll get from them. Our garden is in the transition stage, where the last of the cool-season crops have just come out (I finally yanked the broccoli and cabbage because they just weren't doing anything at all) and have been replaced with hot-season crops so we'll have something to harvest in July and August. With highs in the upper 90s and lower 100s already and lows in the mid-70s throug low-80s, our weather here feels more like late July and August than June, so I am concerned about the effect of the heat on the garden---but there's nothing we can do about the heat except go with the flow. The bigger issue is the lack of rainfall. There's been no rain here for about 3 weeks our last rainfall was a half-inch on May 24t), and no good chance of rain anytime for us anytime in the foreseeable future. With 100-degree heat and no rainfall, everything here is rapidly drying out and turning brown, and we are starting to see grassfires. I'm already wrestling with the decision about whether to water or how much to water. We did run the soaker hoses to water the soil/foundation area yesterday, and I'm going to run a soaker hose in the garden today to water a couple of beds, but I am not doing a lot of watering. The problem with trying to keep a veggie garden green in this kind of heat is that the garden becomes an oasis that attracts tons of bugs when everything else is browning out, and we have a lot of wildlife (deer, raccoons, possums, skunks, rabbits, etc.) trying to get into the garden every day and every night. It is going to be a long summer. We have a surging spider mite and grasshopper population too, but also have lots of ladybugs so I'm not overly worried about the mites. The hoppers may be a problem, but only time will tell. Dawn

Because they wear identical uniforms, I can't swear that it was the chipmunk above checking berries that ended up dusting my piano this morning. The cat with chronic pancreatitis is feeling well, thankfully, but will never be a killer. Ivy was out for one of her 43 morning jaunts, but without permission or a watchful human eye, she ran into the house holding a chipmunk kitten-style in her mouth. She trotted right into the living, collapsed on the soft rug to play with 'Chip', and spat him out at which point he ran directly around to the back of my studio grand, shaking in disbelief between the sound board and the wall, and was now covered in dust of various, somewhat interesting designs. Whizzing the handle on the LED crank flashlight while opening the front door as wide as possible, I spotted him cloaked in a nose-covering web from last Christmas, got a yard stick, and convinced him to seek the light. He ran outside through the open door using at least 64 legs, and what I remember most is 'Chip' lives here because I feed the birds and he eats seeds. I probably should dust more often. Meanwhile, out back, this Jay makes it all look so easy. Jane