Thursday.  Harvested stevia, spearmint, and a nice handful of strawberries.  The strawberries went on our morning cereal.  Dried half of the stevia and all of the spearmint.  The rest of the spearmint is steeping in vodka till tomorrow when I will cook it down for syrup.  I will grind the dried herbs and harvest some of the peppermint and lemon thyme.  (I will do them tomorrow.) I found a pot of creeping thyme at the farm market which I transplanted into a small pot for the spiral plant holder.  We have had cool temps so far and that pattern looks like it will continue.  Last year we went through temperatures in the 90s throughout most of June and July.  We have had few such days this year--so far.  Just checked the thermometer on the patio--55F.

Instead of harvesting anything I have been doing some trimming on the rose, tomatoes, and lower leaves on the Kentucky Wonder beans.  I found two small bean pods developing.  We also watched on to the hummingbirds visiting the melon and borage blossoms.  I wasn't surprised that the borage attracted them.  Bees like borage which is why it is in the garden.  I haven't seen many bees though.  We have seen a large number of the small seed eating birds.  They seem to like it here.  Mom watched about a dozen hopping along the fence (only our sections) and through the gardens.  They don't visit anyone else--probably because there isn't anything for them there.  Saw three visiting the bird bath yesterday to get a drink.  We are watching it and our watering cans for any sign that something less welcome (a.k.a., mosquitos) are visiting.  Haven't found any yet.

Now this is re-purposing!!

Tuesday.  We had rain overnight and will be doing our shopping this morning.  We have a number of errands so I don't think I will do much in the gardens.  I didn't do much yesterday except harvest a handful of strawberries and drown a bunch of those pesky Japanese beetles.  The pheromone trap is working but there are still a lot of beetles out there.

The news sounds more like a broken record than I do commenting on it.  Let's see if I find anything interesting enough to comment on.

Think they are going to "offset" the costs against something else in the budget?  Bet not.  I think it is about time to drop this nonsense and go on to something more productive.  Other committees have already examined Benghazi to the point of nausea.  Time to stake this political vampire and save the tax payers some money.

This takes the litigious nature Americans have acquired to a new low.  The guy falls asleep during a baseball game and finds his image on the TV accompanied by unflattering comments by the sports reporters and he wants $10million.  Crap.

Monday.  Slow day yesterday--at least on the 'net.  Didn't see anything I wanted to comment on.  However, it was a productive day in the gardens.  Harvested lavender, lemon basil, and lemon thyme. The house smelled of lavender and lemon as they dried in the dehydrator.  I changed things a bit.  Took the three strawberries I had on the fence down.  Though the pheromone trap has reduced the numbers of Japanese beetles I still have more than enough to do noticeable damage and they seem to like the high plants best.  I put the strawberries on the table to recover before they were eaten beyond recovery.  The plants on the spiral hanger were all pot bound so the two petunias replaced two of the strawberries on the fence while I split the portulaca and repotted it in two of the small pots on the spiral.  I still have two empty spots to fill.  We had rain overnight which I hope has moved out so I can finish cutting back the lavender thyme.  The spearmint, peppermint, and stevia need to be harvested--again (for each.)  The tomatoes, peppers, beans, and melons are blooming nicely with little peppers and tomes developing well.  The squash is growing well but not yet blooming.  The borage is blooming well but I haven't seen many bees so far.

Saturday.

Oh, my goodness.  I think I might die of shock.  Finally a mainstream news outlet describes something other than envy of our lifestyle that drives the dangerous migration of unaccompanied youngsters into the U.S.

Well,  the FDA is getting into setting guidelines for the salt content of processed foods.  Several years ago we eliminated most processed food from our diets and started examining the rest for salt content. At the same time we stopped using as much salt in our cooking and for a good while banished the salt from the dinner table.  We have since allow the salt back slowly but we aren't consuming it in nearly the quantities we did in the past.  At the table we have a salt grinder which we use sparingly.  But I have to admit that health concerns were not the primary factor impelling the changes.  We simply didn't like the taste of the processed foods and once we started going back to cooking most of our foods from scratch (or nearly) the changes simply snowballed.

I haven't written about the latest abomination from the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby case.  It is so wrong on so many levels I don't know quite where to begin.  Thankfully, David Kaiser has done the job for me.  Last fall I was overjoyed that a Hobby Lobby had opened in town because the Michaels had become such a disappointment.  Not anymore.  I won't be buying anything from either one.  I will exercise my religious "freedom" and not patronize a chain whose owners are intent on imposing their religion on others.  They aren't very far removed from the Sudanese jurists who condemned a woman to death for apostasy because she married a Christian.

Friday.  Happy 4th of July.  We are spending our 4th quietly at home.  Well as quietly as possible.  We have neighbors who shoot off their own fireworks.  I have noticed that the fireworks season has been somewhat abbreviated this year.  In past years they started nightly barrages in early June and continued through the later part of July.  We hadn't heard many explosions until last night which, thankfully, were few.

Interesting thoughts on unplugging from the electronics on the Essential Herbal Blog.  We haven't completely unplugged deliberately but episodes like the outage we had on Tuesday makes us think about how much of our lives are dominated by computers and cable TV.  Thankfully we had power so we turned on the little radio/CD/cassette/vinyl player and we had our shopping trip to occupy us.  And later in the day I put on a stack of our DVD/bluray movies.  We have resisted the "smart" phone craze as much as possible.  Our phones can access the internet but we don't use it.  We don't text but convincing family that we don't want them to text us has been a losing battle.  I don't know what our options will be when we our phones die and we need to find new ones.  We don't walk around with our phone glued to our ears or with our eyes on the screen ignoring everything else around us.  But we do wonder about how much discomfort a total withdrawal from our devices would cause.

In the garden--harvested rosemary, sweet basil, and purple basil which are all in the dehydrator right now.  Harvest half-a-dozen strawberries which are in the refrigerator waiting for enough more to go into cereal.

Thursday.  Very cool this morning (mid 50s) and we had rain overnight.  Don't have much planned for today.  We have the last of the cherries to package.  They should be well frozen now.  Mom wants to take inventory of what is in the freezer so we can plan what meats we need to buy later over the fall.  All too soon the winter will be here and if it is at all like last winter we won't want to go out much at all and we will plan our shopping for the best travel days.

The garden is doing well.  I have several herbs I need to harvest and process over the next couple of days.  The crook-neck squash are putting on a growth spurt with the cooler and wetter weather.  The melons are blooming well.  We got a small bowl of strawberries we ate with our cereal.  I have a pretty variegated basil I want to put in the place of the geranium that that may have given up its ghost.  I say may because I see a small bit of bright green so I may transplant that into a small pot and put it in the little green house.  I have managed to keep most of the gardens under better control so it doesn't look as much like an overgrown jungle.

I knew this was coming.  It is a sad that freedom of religion for these Christianists is the freedom to discriminate.  Their faith has become a club with which to bash everyone else.

Wednesday.  We woke yesterday we had no (cable) TV and no internet.  We didn't get them back until about 8pm. We are amazed at how that discombobulated us; how much both seem to dominate our lives.  Thankfully, we had power which many people still don't have in the greater Chicago area.  The news said some 100k as of this morning.  We didn't see much damage when we went to the farm market and did our grocery shopping.  The corn in the community garden a couple of blocks away had been flattened but most of the rest was in good shape.  One of the venders at the market quipped that he lived in one county but the wind blew him into the neighboring county.  The farm fields around him had serious damage.  Five tornadoes hit well west of here but the straight-line winds did damage not far away--trees, a barn, a silo, and power lines.

Our gardens came through well.  I had one borage plant I had to tie back upright and I lost the weakest of the scented geraniums.  I was surprised it was flattened because it is in a fairly protected place between the wall of the house and the much larger rosemary plants.  Some of the others were a bit battered but still vigorous.  The beetle trap seems to be working.  It already has about a dozen dead beetles in it.

About a week ago we finished the last pack of blueberries we froze last year.  But the new crop is coming in and we picked up a 20lb box at the farm market.  All of it is frozen with the last two trays ready to package.  Today we have cherries to pit and freeze.  We picked up another five +/- lbs to go with the two-and-a-half pounds we bought last week.  I figure we won't have to buy any dried fruit over this next winter.  Since we paid about $1.50/lb for the blueberries and $2.50/lb for the cherries I think we saved money on that.  We like fruit in our cereals and love blueberry pancakes, muffins and syrup on our cheesecake.  We will do the same when the peaches and apples come in.

Update:  we finished packaging the blueberries, splitting/pitting the cherries which are freezing now and I have a quart of green beans fermenting.  I am trying a recipe for green beans I found on line which includes oregano, marjoram, thyme, rosemary and garlic in the jar with the green beans and brine.  Should be interesting.

I can't add anything to Golem XIV's post.  He says what we have said here for sometime:  the financial and commercial elites have no loyalty to place or people and their only god is MONEY.