My sister called me yesterday and mentioned in passing that the Japanese beetles are alive and well on her rose bushes. I remembered that the last time I tried to grow a garden, the beetles attacked my green beans, so The Husband and I took an evening walk to the garden to check for them.
We didn't find any beetles (or any other bug problem), but we did find a few baby green beans!
My favorite way to fix green beans is to saute' them in garlic butter with mushrooms and onions. As soon as I can find a double-handful of green beans, I'll fix us some.
I am keeping a watchful eye on the tomatoes, waiting on that first ripe one. I hope to get it before some animal gets it. The animal I'm most worried about right now is a turtle. I haven't seen one in the garden yet, but I suspect they're out there, just waiting. They will eat the bottoms off of the low-hanging tomatoes. I go to pick what looks (from above) like a beautiful ripe tomato, but when I reach under it to pick it, it's a wet, sloppy mess on the bottom, with V-shaped bite marks where the turtle has been feasting. I have been pondering a way to barricade the tomatoes so that the turtle can't get to them, but haven't come up with a good idea yet. They can climb a little bit, so whatever I do needs to be slippery and fairly tall.
If the turtle gets to the tomato before I do, he will be a soup ingredient, if I can catch him and figure out how to get him out of his shell.
In my yard, the phlox are beginning to bloom. There are so many that I can actually smell them when I walk out the front door. There are other plants in the mix - bee balm, day lilies, obedient plant, sedum - but the phlox just elbow them out of the way.
That stuff you see growing under the seat on the arch is chameleon vine (it my yard, it never turns colors, just stays green).
NEVER, EVER plant this stuff in your yard unless you want it everywhere. See that pathway? That is almost 100% mown-down chameleon vine. I don't even know how it got started on this side of my house. I planted it in a front flower bed that is surrounded by concrete, and somehow this stuff still managed to escape. Last year, I yanked two wheelbarrow loads out of the front bed. It came right back with a vengeance. I dug it up and chopped it down all summer long, thinking I'd eventually kill it. Didn't work. One day, after we'd made ice cream and were ready to dump the ice, The Husband dumped it in that front bed to see if it would kill the vine, and that DID work. We don't know if it was the ice or the salt that killed the spot where he dumped it, but it turned brown and shriveled up, and nothing else grew there all summer. That tactic might have worked, but there are day lilies and rose bushes in the mix, and I don't want to kill them. So the chameleon is back this year, and I'm going to just leave it alone.
Changing the subject from gardening, last night on PBS, I happened to catch the first episode of The Musketeers. It is a short mini-series that showed a few months ago and is being re-run on our local PBS station. We caught a bits and pieces of the original broadcasts, but we didn't see the first episode, and I never saw enough of any episode to catch on to the story. A week or two ago, I finished reading The Three Musketeers, and after watching the first episode last night, I give a thumbs up to the series. While the first episode doesn't precisely follow the story line of the book, the characters' personalities and weaknesses do seem right. I love the expansive music that accompanies the scenes in which the Musketeers are riding out on a mission. Reminds me of old western movies, when the hero rides out.
This week, I began reading John Bolton's book. I'm about halfway through it. So far, he's being a little nicer than I expected.
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