Dear Carol, Mary Ann and all of our gardening friends, I know we normally do our letters on Sunday, but tonight is my first chance to write.  I have the Back-to-School Blues which are composed of meetings, supply runs and uniform shopping.  Bear starts back on Wednesday, and the other two returned to school last week.   Hard to believe I have a junior, a freshman and a 5th grader (who is smarter than me, by the way). We have tomatoes!!!  With the lower temperatures in the 90s, the tomato blossoms have turned into lots of little green tomatoes.  There should be enough time left for them to ripen.  We had three inches of rain last week, and it is supposed to rain tonight.  I will need to watch for blossom end rot, which happens when water is inconsistent. Today's harvest was two small eggplants, five green beans from the pole...

In case you're worried about Sunday's postcard, please don't be.  Carol thought I sounded a bit desperate, but how could I be with all of this beauty surrounding me?  I may not be able to grow vegetables this year, but I can grow flowers. My summer veggie garden may be in disaster mode, but I'm tickled about the pink flowers in my garden this year.  My attitude is surprising since pink has never one of my favorite flower colors.  In the hot sun, the lighter shades always seemed a little too subtle and often faded into white. Not this year.  There were the peonies and roses of May which made cloudy days brighter. The June garden was filled with daylilies of all sizes and stripes, but the pink ones romanced the landscape with both blue and apricot tints. With color like this, who could weep for vegetables (which are annuals...

Dear Friends, It's still hot. We only have cucumbers. Finally, broke down and went to the farmer's market.  Bought tomatoes. They didn't make it home with me, but some local honey and beeswax did. I hate gardening this time of year. It feels like war. Aren't you glad you're not here? Since I have no vegetables, I'll show you a pretty bug instead. If anyone knows what kind of bug it is, I will identify it as something other than the above. For more informative letters, please see Carol of MayDreams Garden and Mary Ann of Idaho Gardener.

Or, of the camera, as it were. My Nikon D90 with its multi-purpose 18-70 mm lens has been at the doctor (all the way to Nikon itself) for most of the summer.  I've been getting by with my very old Olympus 3.2 megapixel Camedia C-3020.  It was my first, digital camera which HH gave me for Christmas, 2001.  Although digital cameras have improved by leaps, bounds and pixels, surprisingly, I found that the Olympus still takes great pictures (although its large, outdated Smart Media card only fit in one reader in my house). I bet you didn't even notice that the photos weren't as good.  (Smile.)  For example, all of the photos except the one below were taken with the Nikon.  The Cuphea/Gaillardia combo was taken with the Olympus.  In a blog, more pixels aren't as necessary, because the blog owner usually re-sizes the photos to be smaller so that...