found

Remember the garden that Secondo planted in a rush, and almost too late? It turns out that we were in such a hurry that we forgot a key component: newspapers to keep down the weeds. My friend Val uses paper feed sacks, an even better idea because they are thicker and larger. I will be saving ours this winter, because the poor garden now looks like this:

Yes, there is a garden in there, though only barely. On closer inspection though, lots of gems were apparent.

The tomatoes finally decided to ripen. Yay! Not enough to make sauce this year, but enough to give a bit of fresh flavor to the store-bought sauce tonight.

I was particularly excited about this discovery, because I had given up on them. This variety of cherry tomatoes, Super Sweet 100, is my very favorite. I will confess to pigging out on them while I continued the search.

Not one but two eggplant. I predict a batch of ratatouille in our near future.

Blackberries are the only thing that were produced in abundance this summer. Unusual for them to still be on the bush this late in the season. Maybe the cool weather in August? I have been enjoying them in my breakfast smoothy for weeks now.

A completely different find: this tiny purple feather in the chicken coop this morning. No, not an exotic breed of chicken, this is not a color generally found in nature... If you guessed Woundkote, you would be correct. One of our chickens suffered a leg injury back in June, and I applied liberal shots of the stuff to keep the wound clean and healing. Must have overshot a bit onto her feathers.