This picture says it all!

My husband recently encountered this truck on his travels through one of our many small towns just north of here.
I thought it deserved recognition for it's wit/bathroom humour.

The picture definitely says it all!

I won! I won! I am so lucky!

 I am going to make this short but it is oh so sweet!

I just received an email from Linda at LEFTBRAINWRITE (http://linda-leftbrainwrite.blogspot.com/) informing me that I had won a copy of Meg Pokrass' book called DAMN SURE RIGHT which is published by  Press 53!!  (http://www.press53.com/bioMegPokrass.html) Not only that but it is going to be signed by Meg herself!  I am absolutely thrilled!  It truly made my day!

My lovely garden

Cauliflower is so lovely!

Broccoli without chemicals!

I am blessed with a beautiful yard with an abundant garden and  huge wrap-around flower beds.  I am also very lucky that my husband also loves to garden and takes a  pride in keeping our yard beautiful. We also don't use chemicals in our  garden but rely on sustainable practices like composting to grow our vegetables. 

My Japanese peonies are huge!

My roses are blooming like crazy, as are the peonies and sweet william.  My mock orange bush in the front of the house (my header picture) is completely covered in fragrant white blossoms - it is truly the most bodacious I have ever seen it!

I love how these are so petite yet so lovely.

My garden is starting to take off now that we have some heat.  It was such a cold wet spring that I thought for sure that my garden would not do well.  It is starting to produce far more than I ever expected!  I can hardly wait to start enjoying fresh produce from the garden.  The only thing that isn't doing well are the beans - it was too cold for them to germinate so they are off to a late start (I think most rotted.) and are just starting to peak out of the ground. My cucumbers are also a bit challenged as we had a wild wind shortly after I planted them and it destroyed most of them.  The rest is wonderful and flowering and just bursting with life!!  I love gardens.

Isn't this rose exquisite?

Smile! I have tomatoes!!

Tomatoes!! Yay!!

Guess what!!!   After a long, cold, extremely wet spring, we have had heat for about a week now and I have tomatoes!!  Not just tomato flowers but actual little tomatoes!

I had made some makeshift "mini-greenhouses" that I had put on top of my tomatoes to compensate for the lack of heat and to keep some of the moisture away from the plants.  I wasn't sure if it would work, but it did!  I have not one, not two but five lovely little (just under 1") tomatoes on a couple plants.  I didn't expect it because of all the cool weather and rain, neither of which tomatoes are particularly fond of.  I wish I had taken pictures of these "mini-greenhouses" because they worked incredibly well and cost me only a couple cents for the string to tie them up.  The greenhouses themselves were discarded fish stocking bags left-over from when my husband stocked various lakes in the region. Who would have thought that they would work so well?

I had a dream about eating a nice, warm toasted tomato sandwich with a bit of Hellman's, homemade bread and black krim tomatoes...mmm  So good but still so far away...sigh