Artomatic and a few things from the backyard

It was lots of fun. Artomatic is pretty superfantastic this year-- great space with lots of interesting stuff. Go visit while it's still going on-- through July 5th!

I spent a bit of the weekend out in the garden, though not as much as I would have liked. Sadly, I spent most of it doing my least favorite gardening task-- weeding. I got about half done, but now it's raining, so I'm sure that all my work will be for naught, as it's meant to rain for the rest of the week.....

The peas look good-- with edible pods! We'll probably have some with dinner tonight.

We have some yellow pear tomatoes coming in. Of course, they're small tomatoes (like grape tomatoes), so I'll be lucky to get a pint out of the plant, but so far so good.

A couple of the sunflowers have bloomed-- this one a bee was enjoying. This one is thanks to friends Roger and Rebecca, who provided the seeds :)

We are still having serious earwig problems. They seemed to abate a little when I swabbed the deck (literally!) with homemade insecticidal soap, but with the rain washing away the effects, I'm thinking they'll be back in force. They've started chomping on the zucchinis and beans and peas, which I'm rather unhappy about. And boy howdy do they looooooove the flowers I have on the deck.

They've plowed through the zinnias-- there are a bunch of skeletal stalks that have been stripped bare.

And they love the nasturtiums above all things. We find them each night swarming all over this plant, eating and eating and eating all of the blooms. Which are edible. By humans. And which I was looking forward to eating myself, thank you icky stupid bug jerks. I was happy when I found a spider that had captured one and was spinning it up for dinner. Now we just need like ten thousand more spiders to get busy with feasting on the earwigs and things will be swell.