Peach glut?

In my opinion there is no such thing.

I started picking the first peaches this morning. We had to cover the first ripening tree because the birds were having a heyday pecking fruit, but thankfully the other two trees will be a few days or weeks in getting ripe yet and I will be able to cover them in turn.

The garden is cooking now

Not really. It is growing and I am cooking. And not too much of that even. We are eating. I believe in scorpaciatta: eat in season, and lots of it. Our current favorite is what I call a "Greek tomato sandwich", only because my mother fixed these when we vacationed in Greece and we had homegrown tomatoes to cook with. This was special because in The Netherlands one could only buy hothouse grown tomatoes (this is before European Common Market, yipes).

Here goes: sauté half an onion in some olive oil. Add about 5 peeled, homegrown tomatoes cut into 1 cm chunks, a little salt and pepper, and leave the whole thing to cook about 1 minute. Serve on homemade wholewheat bread. This is a knife and fork affair because the bread gets pretty soppy. Yum!

Monsoons, up to now

It was wonderful to see some rain after that overly hot and dry June. The first, tentative, storm arrived right on schedule, beginning of July. Since then we have had some showers, nothing very significant, but enough to keep hope. I think we are in a rain shadow of Mt Glenn and the majority of the rain falls in the valley and the Willcox Playa.

No lack of lightening and thunder however. Two days ago, during a night time thunderstorm, lightening hit the mountain and a small fire started. Dan and I were busy during the following morning and did not notice the smoke until the afternoon. Apparently other people had been more observant because the Forest Service had already been notified.

I must admit that forest fires freak me out (Bambi scars), but lightening has hit almost that same spot several times over the years without developing into anything significant, and the Forest Service does take note as we saw a helicopter monitoring. The following morning several government fire fighting vehicles passed us while we were cycling, but by then another shower had extinguished the fire.

I am enjoying the cloudy, but warm, days and continue to hope for more rain.

Looking for a new home

I should say, hacking out a new home, and there was certainly hard work involved. Perhaps it was too difficult because this hairy woodpecker abandoned this attempt.

Or did he give up because of location? This bloomed out agave stalk is just a couple of meters from the patio and would have been subject to daily traffic to and from the bird feeder. It would have been great to watch some woodpecker young being raised from the kitchen window, but alas.

Oh baby, it's hot outside

Not as hot as it was this weekend, but in the 90's. We did have a first rain last night, accompanied by much thunder and lightening which always puts me on the alert, even at 2 am. The air smelled fresh this morning and some of the haze was gone. More rain in the forecast, monsoons may have begun.

Dan had noticed this bobcat a few days ago while grilling on the porch and we watched her trot off with a rodent dangling from her mouth. Today she was back. It is good hunting here for ground squirrels as they compete with the birds for spilled seed. She had already caught her meal, parked it under the ash, took a long drink from the water dish and laid down for a spell.

She then ate her snack, another drink, and off she went. We were able to watch her for about 15 minutes. What a thrill!