Claire, It was lovely here today as well, up into the mid-50's. I went for a walk near one of the oxbow ponds and although the water still had ice on about half of the surface, the birds were enjoying the entire area. Ravens and gulls walking on the ice, geese, ducks, and 2 kinds of mergansers in the water, and chickadees and a mockingbird in the shrubs on the margins. There was also an eagle overhead, but I didn't have a camera with me. Do you put the lawn dragon in the same spot each season or does he migrate around a bit? Jane, your chipmunk looks about set to pop with all that seed in his cheeks. I love the kestrel photos. Kestrels are another favorite bird of mine; they are quite common in Ohio, and their rarity here was one disappointment when I moved to New England. I love the feather patterns for both sexes, and also like watching them fly - they can hover to look for potential prey.

Amy, I avoided the kitchen all I could this weekend because of the heat. We either ate cold meals, ate out, or cooked on the grill outdoors. It is too hot to can, but I'll be doing it this morning anyway. At least the weather today won't be quite as hot. My purple pole beans still are producing too, but I'm tired of picking them (because, you know, then I have to process them or cook them for dinner, lol) so I am going to let the ones still on the plant dry for seed. Nancy, The cooler air is just so nice, even without rain. Rebecca, I cannot believe how hard the squirrels have come back after the tomatoes after they figured out they still could get to them despite the stockings covering them. It is too bad you aren't rural and couldn't let a neighbor just shoot the little furry rodents. That would solve the problem. For what it is worth, I've been watering the zinnias 2 or 3 times a week, and they still manage to wilt and twist and look bad every afternoon. It is sad when the heat is too much for them. I'm hoping to be able to get them through the next couple of hot weeks so they can continue to bloom into fall. The butterflies love them so much that I'd hate to lose them. Melissa, Congrats on getting the home projects done. This is the time of the year when I usually start working on projects indoors in order to give myself a reason to avoid going outdoors in this heat. Even though my garden has had squash bugs for a couple of months, they really haven't been doing much apparent damage until the last couple of days. I know it is time to yank out squash plants now, if I can make myself stay outside long enough to do it, so the squash bugs will perish for lack of something to eat. The danger in doing that is that the surviving squash bugs might move to the muskmelon and watermelon plants in order to survive, so maybe I'll take out the squash plants one by one---maybe one per day---so I can continue to harvest melons for as long as possible before the bugs move to those plants. There are times (and this is one of them) when I wish I could just not care about being organic and instead just go nuts and spray all the squash plants with a synthetic pesticide to kill the squash bugs, but as much as I fantasize about doing it, I'm just not willing to use those chemicals in my garden. Sometimes peppers are slow in the heat and then produce very heavily in the autumn. Since yours haven't done much yet, I'm assuming they're saving themselves for the cooler fall weather. Sometimes putting out shallow pans of water for the birds will deter them from eating the tomatoes since what they're really after is water. Sheets will work only if they completely cover the plants like a tent and are held down firmly to the ground to keep birds from getting up underneath them. Bird netting works, but only if the birds cannot find a way underneath it. Those fake owls absolutely do not work so save your money there. Anything that moves in the sun, preferably something highly reflective, often will startle the birds and keep them away. You can use bird flash tape (our Walmart had it earlier in the season, I don't know if they have it now), aluminum pie pans, old CDs, etc. Tie them to the plants or to the cages using thread, string or fishing line and leave them loose so they can twist and turn and move in the wind. Eileen, Those cucumbers are diseased, which is not uncommon because there's tons of diseases that affect cucumbers---they are disease magnets and cucumber beetles spread diseases right and left all summer long. If you haven't fed the plants lately, you might feed them the water-soluble fertilizer of your choice to see if it pushes out a lot of new growth. Then you could remove all the old diseased foliage. I'm not sure what your cucumbers have. You can go to the Cornell University vegetable MD online website and compare your plants to photos there of cucurbit diseases and see if you find a match that helps you figure out what it is. To me, cucumber diseases look so much alike that I rarely bother trying to figure out which one a plant has---it largely is irrelevant because once they're sick and we are this hot, it is hard to save them. I just yank out the cucumbers in late July or early August and plant new seeds for fall. Here's the cucurbits page from vegetablemdonline: Cucurbit Disease Info At Vegetable MD Online With cucumber diseases, you often get multiple diseases at the same time, making diagnosis by photograph really tricky. You can cut off the sunscalded parts of the cucumbers and eat whatever is left. H/J, Normally the spider mite population peaks around late July and starts falling. Hopefully that will happen in your garden (it would help if some rain would fall since spider mites like it dry and dusty). The spider mites I had on my peppers earlier in the summer never did much damage and seem mostly gone now. Perhaps lady bugs or green lacewings or some other beneficial insect ate them. My tomato plants look like crap but are still producing too. That's really all we can ask of them when it is this hot and dry, and when pests and diseases galore are everywhere. Tomatillos do not fall off the plant while very small unless some insect or disease is infesting them. With tomatillos it usually is because some very small tomatillo grubs, sort of like tomato pinworms, infest them. I haven't had them here, but lots of people in OK have a lot of trouble with them and cannot get a tomatillo crop because of them. Spraying the plants in general with Bt might help. Ground cherries are edible, but I found myself unimpressed by them the year I grew them and never bothered growing them again. YMMV. Jerry, I bet it was all the rain that affected your watermelon flavor. I have had heavy rainfall do that to mine some years. I hope the watermelon jelly gels, but even if it doesn't, you'll have yummy watermelon juice to drink. My garden is burning up right along with yours. I could keep watering and maybe keep it going, but there's no point in this heat. I'm going to focus on keeping the peppers, the flower border and the fall tomatoes alive and let everything else go. In a few weeks, I'll plant stuff for fall......if it seems like it might rain again some day. I'm not big on trying to start a fall garden in vicious heat if there's no rain, so reserve the right to change my mind about fall plantings. Really, with lots of canning done, tons of potatoes and onions in dry storage, and the freezers just about full, I can walk away from the garden and know we have had a really productive year despite the weather. We did have 1/3 of an inch of rain yesterday evening. It was nice, but I'm not overly excited about it---today's sunshine probably will suck up all that moisture right out of the ground before the sun sets today. In the overall scheme of things, 0.33" isn't enough to get excited about. Now, if we'd had 1 or 2 or 3" I'd be deliriously happy, but that didn't happen and it almost never happens in July or August, so I'm not getting my hopes up. We've been dry all year and, while that 3" of rain that fell in early July helped a lot, it is long gone and the soil is dry and cracked and parched and it is going to take a lot of rain over a prolonged period of time to turn things around. I just don't see that happening in July or August. So, thinking about how dry we've been most months of the year just made me wonder what things look like statewide in terms of year-to-date rainfall...you know....who's had above average rainfall (Jerry? Nancy? anyone?)....who's had below average rainfall (Me? Amy? Melissa? Eileen? anyone else?).....is anyone sitting right at average rainfall? So, I'm going to go get the average rainfall maps and post them here and we can all look at them and ponder why the weather does what it does. Here's the year-to-date rainfall in inches: OKMesonet Year To Date Rainfall in Inches Of course, the rainfall map in inches is more meaningful if you know how much rain each area receives because there is a huge variation in average rainfall totals across the state. So, here's the map that shows rainfall as a percentage of average rainfall for the same time frame: Year To Date Rainfall As A Percentage of Average The numbers on the above map surprised me. Even folks who have had plentiful rainfall at times aren't doing that well overall. So, one final measurement is the map that shows how large of a rainfall deficit (or surplus) there is at each Mesonet station compared to what would be average rainfall for the same period. Here's that map: Year To Date Rainfall Departure From Average The above map is pretty self-explanatory. Blue is great, orange is awful, and everything else in between could be considered various shades of good or bad. And, really, for our gardens, what matters most is what has happened in the last month, but it has been so dry, I refuse to look at those maps because it would be too depressing. July is the hardest month. Dawn

Hummers here are bulking up. Lots of long drinks and lots of chasing quite often. I think there are a steady 5 at the feeder. 2 males, 3 females. All started with Buddy. Speaking of perpetuating the species, this guy must be in pain. Heavy, painful molting all over and the kid still wants to be fed. May want to rethink that 'go forth and multiply' thing a bit more in the future, lol. I think this monarch's wings look like they are aged and thinning. The topside could look like pollen or dust, but then I cropped another shot and you can see there are 'cracks' or wear in her wings visible from the underside. The next group born is the one that goes to Mexico - so I think. same shot closely cropped below https://www.monarch-butterfly.com/life-span.html Jane

Must be the mood, forgive me, but I can't resist. We've all been there, done that. Below are some of my hostas this morning - with new leafless stalks. Not nice, but funny. While walking around the neighborhood last summer with a great neighbor-friend, we usually check growing landscapes, you know, who did what, what's new, etc. Well, at the end of the cul-de-sac where the family had planted a row of arborvitae a few years back, I noticed that suddenly things had changed. I said "Wait! Stop. Look at that?" Nancy, who is used to me, said "What? - I don't see anything". Look at those arborvitae, said I, the deer path has changed. "Oh, yeah, said she. Boy they sure nibbled those away quickly didn't they?" To which I said, "Yes, but these deer are talented sculptors - look from this angle". She moved into where I had been standing and she burst into laughter. There, in perfectly nibbled trees, were 6 evergreen penises. Must have been a Mom and her babies - not too tall. I don' know if there is a moral to the story, BBBundtcake, but finding some humor goes a long way. My age won't allow me to write the joke lines that were made that night, but if laughter was a fertilizer, those arborvitae will never need a little blue pill. 😂