just sayin'......

not a good idea!!!!

what the?????

i showed you in my last post how i have been canning the tomatoes out of my neighbor's garden.  they are away and i have been picking the ripe vegetables out of their garden so they don't rot.  i showed the beautiful bounty i reaped 

and what i did with it for them...

curtis and don are very (friendly) competitive when it comes to their gardens. they start them from seeds in early spring and every year, there is a competition to see who can grow the biggest pumpkins.  we plant mostly the same kinds of  tomato plants....lots of heirloom tomatoes and big red, juicy ones.

well, i picked again from curtis's garden on saturday morning and got
this....

don picked the tomatoes from our garden saturday morning and got
this....

huh???????
looks like we aren't even in the running this year!!!
:)

oh, yes i "can".....

our fabulous neighbors and friends, curt and laura

left for utah last week to drop off their daughter

at byu for her first year in college.  since they will be gone for 10 days, we are in charge of looking after their garden.  the day before they left, they had picked a huge bowl full of tomatoes, banana peppers and jalapeno peppers.  since they would probably go bad before they came back, 

they were entrusted to me....
hmmmmm....what to do with the first real bounty of summer?.....
salsa, of course!

so i canned 12 pints of it.....
a few days ago, i hit up their garden again and came home with this.

see that really big one at the top, the one that is split in two?   it put up a valiant fight to prevent me from picking it.....but i won.

there weren't enough peppers to make more salsa, so i just canned the tomatoes.....
6 quarts of garden gold.....

now, if only our garden will start producing tomatoes like these......
i will be checking their garden later today to see if there is anymore to pick....
and to can!!!
and just because they are so cute, here are the rest of the kids

hope you have a great weekend.....

senior pictures......

the lovely kellie......

 we found a few really cool places to shoot her senior pictures.

this lovely gazebo and fountain is at the entrance to a subdivision a few miles away. 

 i also found an abandoned railroad track with the graffitied up train cars just waiting for us to use as a backdrop.  that's her cute dog...

 we also took some of the pictures in my yard.  

the weather was perfect.

 my favorite place so far though, is this old abandoned house.  there are no windows or doors, just an old crumbling foundation and peeling paint...perfect backdrop for teens...

 and last but not east, we found a golf course that closed a few years ago and is now completely overgrown.  it's sad but it was cool for us.

we drove our car on the cart path to get to the spot where we took the pictures....we weren't there for 10 minutes when a car came driving up behind us asking what we were doing there.  apparently, it has been used by the local kids as a party spot and they were making sure that we weren't there to party...  huh?  one car, three people and a camera?....oh well, i can appreciate that they are looking out for the surrounding neighbors...

thank you kellie, you were a perfect model and you are beautiful....

it's a jungle out there.....

or as i like to call it, 

the incredible shrinking raised bed...
i'd say the incredible shrinking yard, but our yard is about an acre.  as we get deep into the dog days of summer, everything is lush, very green and beautiful.  

here are the pictures of our front and back yards as promised....

this and the next pictures are the garden in the front of the house just past the porch.  to the right you can see the backside of Petey, our gargoyle. he looks weird because i took these pictures just after watering. this bed includes a butterfly bush, shrub roses, spiderwort and stella d'oro lilies surrounding the gazing ball.

i got that for mother's day a few years back.  it's gorgeous!

when i was watering the gardens the hose made a rainbow....i love rainbows....

this bed is in front down toward the street.  just some perennials and grasses under an oak tree.

the backyard has a couple of willow trees that we planted a few years ago.  they are getting so big so fast....we also have a large retention pond where we have been breeding our mosquito population this summer.  and since the mosquitos need to eat, i usually stand out in the yard for a few minutes every evening so they can pig out...  ugh!!  have the mosquitos where you live been worse than usual this summer?  it almost makes me want the colder weather just to get rid of them.  (almost).

this bed has russian sage and black eyed susan.  there is a small lilac bush just to the right of that bed and a golden curly willow to the left. 

this jungle, i mean, garden, is don's pride and joy.  i would try and point out where things are planted but i don't know where they are anymore.  my machete is on order...

don likes to grow sunflowers in his vegetable garden.....he thinks it adds interest and i guess it does.  he is constantly hacking off the bottom leaves so the garden actually gets some sun.....and yes, i painted the wire fence surrounding the garden turquoise.....

this year he had some help planting the sunflowers from the birds.  they dropped seeds everywhere in the yard..... 

randomly in the flower beds...

in the flower pots, and yes, that is a sunflower in the flower pot.

they also grace either side of the steps leading to the kitchen here...

and on the other side.  this ones head is so big and heavy it is in a permanent state of "bent over".

the blue jays love the sunflower seeds and will hang upside-down to get at them when the heads are like this.  you can't see it very well, but don has this sunflower staked with a hockey stick...

there is a huge one growing near the window too!!!

on the east side of the house our purple robe locust has a companion this year too....

another sunflower....

entwined in the crook of the tree trunk and branches....

underneath the kitchen window is our very tall rudbeckia plant...it is about 3 feet taller than me.

the large tree on the left is a river birch and is really beautiful, with its cinnamon colored peeling bark. to the right is the vegetable garden and, last but not least,

the incredible encroaching pumpkin plants.  our neighbor's property starts where the black lava rock is on the right side.  their deck is just to the right of the big pine trees.  there is usually a pumpkin growing near their deck every year.  we let them keep that one.... :)

so that concludes the tour of our little piece of nature......thank you for stopping by.

weird sky at night, sailor's delight....

i have seen some weird skies in my life....living in the midwest we have lots of active weather with 

thunderstorms, tornados, hail and blizzards....

but this one was about the weirdest i have ever seen.

the sky was an orangish brown and encompassed the entire western skyline.  we had just had a threatening rainstorm that actually was not as bad as the weather men were predicting but i have never seen a sky like this in michigan.  it gave the entire area a very strange yellow glow.

this was the view out of my laundry room window, the only west facing window we have in the house.  the glow was so bright that i thought that the light was on in there.  

the storm brought a much needed cooler breeze that night.

 in the east, we were graced with a rainbow that was so big,
 i didn't have a lens wide enough to capture it all....

we woke up the next morning to this...

foggy site.  

it was really quite still and peaceful.  this is the road that leads out of our neighborhood.

the yard looked very ethereal too.

what are those large vines growing outside of the garden, you ask?

why, those would be don's pumpkin vines....encroaching into the neighbor's yard to the far right....

here is a closer view....

they also grow into our vegetable garden where we have tomatoes, raspberries, strawberries, tomatillos, rhubarb and more tomatoes.  we have a separate herb garden back behind there, where the pumpkins haven't quite invaded, but they are surrounding the bed and i expect a full scale attack to occur any day now.  don also planted tons of zinnias and sunflowers in the vegetable garden, so it's kind of a jungle in there.  but, that's how he likes it and we have about 6 or 7 pumpkins going....

i will do a post on the sunflower explosion we had this year very soon!

the night view....

  and the morning view...

what a view!!!!!  weird...