Pollinators by the cloud!

Blessings Darlings!

We have hit the time of year, where I can tell you the time of year by looking at the 'island' in my kitchen. Said island is covered with Too Many Tomatoes to Eat, and Too Few Tomatoes to Can.  And I only put in 2 tomato plants this year - and only let two of the dozen volunteer tomatoes keep growing.  So far I've only gotten tomatoes off of the volunteer plants.  One of the volunteers is a Cherokee Purple, one is a Brandywine, so I'm thrilled.  They are my favorite types, and it's not surprising that they volunteered since I did grow them last year.  But I threw seeds/etc from all the tomatoes we had over the year, store bought and home grown, into that compost pile, so there was no guarantee that they'd be my favs.

So I added a diced tomato to my leftovers for breakfast.  The Chubby Hubby is having a big salad with a full tomato in it for lunch.  Tomorrow we'll feast on BLTs.  Previous years I was able to give tomatoes and such away to coworkers.  This year, not having any coworkers, we're going to have to be on Tomato Eating Overdrive.  Which is replacing the Yellow Squash Eating Overdrive we had been on (and I still do have a few of them left to eat, too.)

Everything blooming here has a heavy cloud of Black Wasps around them, especially the spearmint.  The black wasps are great pollinators and feed their larva on bugs that would eat my garden, so they are win/win.   They don't get the great press that honeybees get, or even that bumble bees get, but they are every bit as helpful and easy to live with.

Frondly, Fern