Fruits and Vegetables, and a Few Nuts.

What's been going on in my head this week is hardly light and fluffy stuff.

Shootings, by police officers, and of police officers, fill the news. Being black in America is dangerous. So is being a cop when nut cases get guns. 

 When it's not that, it's politics. Yes, I am glad that Hillary Clinton was not indicted. One would hope that would be the end of "those damn e-mails", but no, the Republicans are so disappointed that they can't send Hillary to prison that they will keep trying, just to keep her name negatively in the news.  

So I baked banana bread.

Do you stage your bananas? I try to. We share a large banana every morning as part of our breakfast. I buy green ones as the last purchased batch is ripening, hoping the overlap is perfectly timed. This week is wasn't, so I baked banana bread. 

I'll probably wrap it up and put it in the freezer, since I am once again trying to lose weight, after indulging over the 4th of July put me over the tipping point. 

These problems are much easier to deal with than those big ones that fill the news. 

About the vegetables. They are growing in our garden. 

The rooster rules the herb patch, which includes caged catnip. Have you ever seen what a cat can do to unprotected catnip? 

 Beans and cucumbers are climbing.

 The basil that survived the cold, wet spell is beginning to flourish, bordered by short orange and yellow cosmos. 

 Sweet peas are just beginning to open their buds. 

 Yes, we have as many flowers in our vegetable garden as we do vegetables. 

 Romaine lettuce is forming heads in the company of dahlias, and the butter crunch lettuce has been supplying us with yummy salad greens. Good diet food. 

 The zucchini has erupted, and the crop will soon be hard to keep up with. 

Under the row cover fabric cloche, carrots and beets are growing unmolested by carrot worms and leaf miners. 

And then there's the raspberry patch.

 What? You don't see any raspberries? 

 Well, that's because we took them out. We miss them, of course, but the plants were old and becoming diseased, and the fruit became infested with Asian fruit fly, which lays eggs of the surface of the tiny green fruit. The eggs hatch into tiny white worms which enter the fruit and turn it to mush. Not nice at all.

We will leave the ground fallow for two years and try raspberries again. In the meantime, we have scattered flower seeds with abandon and are loving our pretty patch. 

 It is bordered with sunflowers, including these chocolate sunflowers. 

 Lest you think we are not growing tomatoes, we are. They have their own place in a heat trap on the west side of the garage, 

 and in front of the green house. 

So there you go, a little diversion from the news.

And now it's the weekend. We have plans to have some fun. I hope you do too.