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.