July 26, 2026
On July 5, I was in the garden watering the plants. I saw this little bird hiding behind the tomato plants. I also noticed another bird on one of the T-Post.
The tomato cages didn’t hold up. I now realize that if I want to grow tomatoes in cages, I’ll need to prune them. Letting them grow wild causes problems, such as the tomato cage falling over and making the tomatoes hard to reach. That’s what gardening is about: trying new things and seeing what happens.
Over my neighbor’s field, I noticed a flock of egrets flying past. Most of the flock landed in the creek on his property. Four decided to rest in his hickory tree. At first, I thought there were only three birds. As they took off, I saw the fourth egret.
I picked so many tomatoes that I needed to do something with them.
We didn’t get much of a sunset. It was too overcast.
On July 6, it was time for homemade tomato sauce! Almost everything in the sauce came from my garden: garlic, basil, oregano, thyme, peppers, and onion. The only things that I put in the sauce that didn’t come from my garden were salt and black pepper. I put the tomatoes, garlic, onions, basil, oregano, thyme, and peppers into the food processor. I liquefied the tomatoes since I wanted the skins to disappear and someone (me) didn’t want to peel all those tomatoes.
I made six quarts of tomato sauce. One quart was placed in the fridge, and the rest were placed in the freezer.
Bruce was enjoying his speed mowing.
We had a brief rainstorm, then the sky cleared. Bruce was happy he had finished mowing before the rain came. We had a lovely double rainbow that became a single rainbow.
The sunset was pretty.
As twilight settled over Blackberry Homestead, it was hornworm hunting time! Bruce made it to the tomatoes first. Using the black light flashlight, Bruce started shining the black light onto the tomato plants. As he moved around, he noticed a couple of critters. He called me over, and I got to see one of them. The picture didn’t turn out that well, since it was twilight.
Yep, that is a baby skunk.
We waited until the skunks were out of sight before resuming our war on tomato hornworms.
That made for an interesting end to the day
Blackberry Homestead 