Fall Count Up #2 is happening! Today I went around my garden and yard checking out all the things thatare growing. It’s the time of the summer when everything is producing. I don’t have an enormous garden, as I have in years past. This year almost everything except tree fruit is growing in raised beds than are small and manageable. Check out what I have so far:

I love sunflowers. They are bright and beautiful and easy. You can plant them once and end up with volunteers for the rest of your life. Every spring I go on sunflower patrol or they would take over all the flower beds. This bloom has a huge fuzzy bee!

Another easy crop is zucchini. I always end up with more zucchini each year than I will ever eat in a lifetime. And if you forget to pick them for a couple days, you get watermelon sized squashes. They are usually too big for using, but they have seeds like pumpkins that you can roast and snack on.

Speaking of pumpkins, here is one that Lucy-Girl carved her name into when it was teeny weenie. This is a jack-o-lantern pumpkin, but I’m not sure it will make it to Halloween. It looks nearly ready to pick!

One of the biggest crops in the garden is always tomatoes. I always can a ton of these. Plus using them in salads and salsas when their fresh is so gosh darn much better than using grocery tomatoes.

One of my favorite fruits is watermelon. While I always try to make sure the garden is well watered and fertilized, I give special attention to the melons.

I have a dozen or better fruit trees as the border in my yard. They are still young and I never get much fruit off them, but hey look! An apple might just make it until it’s ready to pick!

Here’s a couple red plums that should be ready any day. There are also cherry, nut, apricot, pear, and peach trees. Literally none of them have anything worthy of a photo. I’m a terrible orchardist.

This is Mrs. Balkins. She is the only current egg layer on the farm. She likes to come in the house and lay eggs in my bedroom. After finally tackling that problem, the windows were left open in my truck and she started laying eggs on the seat. Mrs. Balkins desperately wants to be a house chicken and if chicken diapers were a thing, she’d probably get her way.
Only a month or so more of gardening season. Which is great because I am anxious to be lazy. But now I need to stop writing for the day as I have jam on the stove that needs canning.