Tomatoes

Our tomato harvest is lagging behind what it was last year at this time. We have 23 producing plants, about what we had before. The daytime temperatures are almost 20 degrees cooler (although it's going to get hot soon) and the night time temps are in the 70's, a little cool for tomatoes. The drought is not as bad this year. It will be interesting to see the results of that combination of moisture and temperature. Anyway, here's our first bacon and tomato sandwich of the season:

 

 

 

 

Salsa's cooking!  I've spent the last hour or so helping Dorothy in

the quality control department.  We've been sampling the salsa with

tortilla chips and she has been making adjustments here and there to

achieve the perfect taste.

 

Tomatoes ripening in the kitchen window.....

 

and in the laundry room. The two on the left are Cherokee Purples,

not very pretty on the outside but superb flavor.

 

 

 

 

We picked black berries behind our house today and then went down by the creek for more. There was not one ripe berry on the vines. The grass had been stepped on all around the vines so some varmint, two legged or four, had had a feast. I looked around for scat to determine what kind of thief made off with our berries but only found a few cow turds.  I've never heard of cows eating black berries.  The thorns probably wouldn't hurt their thick hides but I would think that their mouths and noses would be too tender to allow them to push deep into the bushes to clean them out.  

(I left off writing this post to Google the subject of cows eating blackberries and according to the articles I read cows will not only eat blackberries but also wild roses and thistle.  You learn something new every day)