Okra, Tomatoes and Nasty Orange Bugs

Okra is having its heyday in our garden. Every day we pick a couple of handfuls. Except when we skip a day, and then we get this:

Unfortunately, the giant okra is just too tough and fibrous, and the bottom half of these big guys end up in the compost bin.

I love the okra blossoms, that creamy yellow with the velvety burgundy center. You can see that we will continue to get okra for while...look at all those babies.

Okra plants in the garden
about 4 1/2 to 5 feet tall.

That's Spaz , world's most misnamed cat, trying to have a private moment in the shade.

Here are our two first San Marzano tomatoes, a Sicilian paste variety, along with some more reasonably sized okra. When you cut into these tomatoes, there is no juice and jelly like stuff around the seeds, and the walls of the tomato are very thick. They are supposed to be the best for spaghetti sauce, and I hope to get to try that out. Although we only have the one plant, it has 15 or more green tomatoes on it right now, several about to ripen.

San Marzano

The Early Girl bush tomato also has over a dozen tomatoes on it right now, after taking a brief break after it s first blush of prodution, and there are a few green ones on the Black, an heirloom tomato that is sprawling all over the corner of the garden and which I planted from seed. I am really excited; I have never had luck growing tomatoes from seed before.

And here are the nasty bugs that are trying to suck the life out of my tomatoes.

They are the immature, or nymph, form of the stink bug, or a similar variety, called the leaf-footed beetle...or something like that. Since I took this picture on Thursday or Friday, I managed to deal with a few of them by hand (ugh), and the rest morphed into the regular brown stink bugs.

Mosaic Garden Pots WIPs

Sunday I started working with thinset as an adhesive for the first time. In addition to being the correct adhesive for outdoor objects, I am enjoying working it for these pots over other glues I've tried for non-flat, non-horizontal surfaces. I am still getting used to it.

One of my biggest problems with something vertical, or 3d, is impatience! In fact, I have been known to try to rush things along, not let the pieces dry long enough before turning the work, mess everything up and get really frustrated....like a million times. So today I solved that problem to some degree. I just worked on two pieces at once.

The larger pot


One pot ready to grout, splotchy with thinset and another sealed and drying.

The pot to the right is now about 1/3 done with blue, lavender and blue, and white and blue tessera, as I alternated between that and the bigger green, black and white pot...much less frustrating to wait out the drying time that way. I worked out on my deck much of the day, in spite of the wasp that began hovering around and around under the table, until a little after two. It was 92 degrees and definitely time to come in. Of course my child hurried through her math this afternoon and ran outside to ride her bike.