we had a very nice rain/storm earlier, so i suppose i won’t have to water tomorrow.  moving on…in case you did not know, ( and why should you), chickens don’t care if its raining, thundering, or lightening out.  here’s chicken jomo… out and about.  although its not actually raining when i took the picture, i swear she’s in the same spot she was when it was raining.  you can tell she been eating.  look at her breast area (crop area)…its HUGE.

and while looking at her from the house, my son noticed a sunflower, poking up from above the tomatoes.

they’re everywhere… although, something has been eating the heads off…

you can only take so much grilled zucchini and zucchini bread, and then you just wish your plants would die.  mine were looking a little sad until this last ‘storm’ which blew the plants over, and now they are regrowing/reblooming exponentially. but, in the meanwhile, my dad gave me two huge zucs from his garden.  what to do…what to do?  i quartered them so they would fit into the food processor, cut the seeds out, and then shredded the lot.  i froze 4 quarts and then made double chocolate zucchini bead with the rest.  chocolate makes everything better!

tomatoes are starting ripen.  i thought i planted all paste varieties in the lower garden.  i picked some of the jersey giants yesterday, but they are not suppose to look like the photo below.  now i need to figure out what these are.  (another mistake)

the soys beans are ready.  the plants had fallen over a few times due to the (very few) storms we had this summer, but, they still did really well.  we decided to harvest half of them this morning.  only half you ask…the boys were helping and by the time they got to the third plant, all the fun was sucked right out of it.  we will, and by that i mean i will, finish picking the pods off the plants tonight. we’ll be eating edamame for a while. the rest i will blanch and then put them into bags for the freezer.

the benefit of the soy plants is the great job they do at fixing nitrogen back into the soil. i usually cut the plant stalk at the soil line and leave the roots where they are.  with the boys helping, they were all about pulling the whole plant out of the ground…then removing the nitrogen fixing nodules from the roots and throwing back to the ground.

woo who…it has finally rained enough over the last 2 days to make a difference. (its still raining now…happy dance).  the cucumbers and squash all seem to have powdery mildew (thanks to the no rain, high heat and high moisture we have been having for weeks). they’ll be on their way out soon.  so, i decided to make pickles from the lemon cucumbers that are still producing.