Summer Bounty

When I was picking beans this morning I came across this sight which is not unusual at all but I think it's sort of adorable. A vine has sent its little tendril out in search of support and found one of its own beans which it has embraced so delicately and so gracefully. 
This was a much prettier sight than all of the damn thumpers I saw today. I startled one, I suppose, who jumped off the fence and landed on my foot and I swear- I thought for a millisecond that an actual animal had landed on me. Well, I guess those things are animals but not the sort of animals which generally carry that much weight and heft. 

Mr. Moon had his annual today with Dr. Zorn. He came home singing his praises. He said, "He comes in and sits down and crosses his legs like he's not going to just jump up and run out in two minutes and he talks to you!"
Yep. 
Glen also has a touch of the white coat hypertension and as with me, Zorn waits a while and then retakes the blood pressure manually and it has always come down to normal in the time you've been talking to him. 
"He's magic, isn't he?" I asked Glen. 
"He really is," my husband said. 
This is not how people generally discuss their doctors, is it? 

So he was in a very good mood because everything looked good and he was told to just keep on doing whatever it was he was doing which pleased Glen to no end. He celebrated by going to Bass Pro Shop and buying fishing hooks. 

After I picked beans I needed some time to cool off and eat lunch. So I did those things and then went back out to the garden and staked peppers and eggplant. Glen told me where there were some stakes in the garage and I found them. They're old tobacco stakes which were originally used to hang tobacco on to dry and where he got those stakes is a mystery to me but there they were. Something in his garage that I would have described as something he really did not need to have hanging around and he would have defended as saying we might need them for something and here I was, pounding aged pieces of split saplings into the ground with a small hammer and tying vegetable plants to them. 

We really ought to start cutting pieces of green bamboo and drying them for our staking needs. God knows we have enough to spare. I remember when we first moved here I was going to build a privacy screen of some sort by lashing bamboo together but I've never gotten around to that somehow. 
The garden looks even tidier now, doesn't it? My house may be a complete wreck but by golly, my garden is tidy as hell this year. I did not need to stake all of the peppers and eggplants but most of them needed some help. 
The clown pepper is standing strong and is the tallest pepper I have. I noticed today that after what? a month? it is finally producing more peppers than the original two that showed up. There are little baby clown peppers all over that thing!

Now I didn't know a darn thing about clown peppers and indeed, had never even heard of them until this year when I bought one. All I knew about them came from a very brief and casual search of the internet. Mostly what I knew was that they are supposedly somewhat spicy but not too hot, and they turn red. I just looked them up again and found a woman's blog post about them and her experiences in growing them. And she lives right down the road in Quincy which is a little town I've written about. We pass through it on our way up to Lake Seminole. I need to spend a little time perusing her blog. It looks quite interesting. How could I not have known anything about this?
She says that she had a clown pepper "tree" that was five feet tall. At the time of her writing about the peppers, it was a year and a half old. How very, very cool! We shall see what happens with mine. 

Another garden-related thing I did this afternoon was to make a new batch of pepper vinegar. I've been collecting cayenne peppers for a few weeks now, just for this purpose. 

It looks a little cloudy because I used a mixture of white vinegar and "natural" apple cider vinegar which has that oh-so-important and highly nutritious "mother" sediment that is to be found in that vinegar. The bottle is the same one my old pepper vinegar was in although it was thoroughly washed. The peppers in it were practically melting gel when I removed them (not an easy thing to do) yesterday. A bottle of pepper vinegar can last in the refrigerator for in infinite amount of time. You just keep covering the peppers with more vinegar. Some people don't even refrigerate it but I do out of an abundance of caution as we used to say during Covid. 
Pepper vinegar is de rigueur for seasoning cooked greens of all kinds, especially collards, turnips, and mustard greens. We set it on the table so that everyone can anoint their greens to the degree which they prefer. 
You know you are in a real southern restaurant when there is a bottle of pepper vinegar on each table. The kind with a yellow flip-top lid and many extra bonus points if the peppers are bleached almost white from possibly years of use. 
I am not kidding you. Those are usually tabasco peppers and I have some of those planted too so I will be preparing various pepper vinegars this summer. I think they will make lovely Christmas presents, especially if I use both the green and the very ripe red ones. That bottle, however, will be ours. By the time our fall garden greens are ready to eat, that sauce should be just about perfect. 

I watered the porch plants today, which was long over-due. Bless those plants' hearts. They not only tolerate a lack of moisture, they also tolerate me. 
I did some sweeping, I've done some laundry, I've done a little mending and button moving. 
I have two pairs of the men's cargo shorts that I love but they are a little too big as in, they are simply too big. And I have another pair which is the size down from them that are just a little too snug for my comfort. Men's pants come in waist size and in a lot of cases they only have the even numbers of inches which is weird. So I moved the button on the smaller ones just a tiny bit and I think that will do the trick. I may be inspired to move the buttons on the other two pairs a tiny bit to the other side. We shall see.
The mending was done on one of the dresses May returned to me. It is so pretty and I want so much to wear it but when I went to iron it, I realized that some of the seams needed attention. I honestly think this is due to aging, mostly. The dress has to be at least thirty years old but it has pockets, I love it, and I am not giving up on it yet. I stitched up one place and will get to work on the other places that need some loving attention. 

All-in-all, it has been a very good day. Healthy husband, many beans, a tidier garden, a little needlework accomplished, and the possibility of a five foot tall clown pepper tree! 
A girl could hardly ask for more. 

Here's a picture of a giant swallowtail butterfly. The poor thing has tattered wings but is still beautiful. 

And another picture of it on a different zinnia. 

Off to go make a shrimp salad which Mr. Moon actually requested. He NEVER does that. But what a good choice although it never ceases to amaze me how many steps can be involved in the preparation of a salad.

I think most of you will absolutely understand this puzzlement. 

Love...Ms. Moon