some of the famous "white stuff"

Here's some of my favorite "white stuff" flowers. One of my friends was convinced it was a variety of yarrow, but it looks nothing like yarrow to me.

It has very tough stems, so if you don't like it it's impossible to pull out or to string trim. The bees seem to be very fond of the little miniature daisies, but my attempts to catch them enjoying the nectar were sabotaged by the wind.

It does seem to like growing at the edges of things: the edge of the parking gravel, the edge of the house, the edge of the woods. I like it a lot, but I have no intention of letting it invade all the flower beds.

wooly worm warning

I can't remember what the stripes are supposed to mean for winter weather prediction, but I think this fellow is predicting something dramatic.

I've never seen one with such broad stripes and so few of them.

rainbow season

The sun has travelled far enough south that I have rainbows again when the rising sun shines through the beveled glass.

Enjoyable though fleeting.

cayenne now?

Or, depending on what you mean, not until they've dried and been ground up.

The little one at the top gave me the clue that it was time to harvest them. I went to check on how ripe they were and saw that it had fallen off the plant, harvesting itself.

Based on previous experience, these five should give me about a year's worth of cooking, since I cook only for myself most of the time.
  

Drying is advancing in the second picture. It always reassures me when they fail to rot.

Sunday morning coffee with tomato sauce

I spent an ambitious and focused day trying Daryl's tomato sauce recipe. Here.

I didn't have half a bushel of tomatoes, because it's so late in the season that I couldn't buy that many local tomatoes. I kept waiting for the weather to cool off some (at least down from 90F!) so I could stand having the oven on all day.

That's about half of what my friend with the produce stand had left of their own home grown (not seven miles from me) tomatoes. I was too late to get any of the heirloom ones. Next year I will just tough it out and start earlier in the season.

My two roasting pans are rather shallow. Before next year I'll have to find something larger.

More ingredients.

The basil was really fresh.

Yes, there was coffee involved in this marathon of chopping.

Beautiful colors. Too bad they will disappear with cooking.

I ended up with less than two quarts of sauce, more of a paste consistency. Next year! With more tomatoes! It's delicious. I didn't take any pictures of the finished product because plastic freezer boxes look much the same whatever is in them.

dew

The camera does not see what I see. I was enchanted by the gleam of dew on the foxtails in the rising sun.

The light shows up well, and a few drops on the leaves, but each whisker on the seeds was outlined in reflective wetness.

The little beads of dew on the leaves look flat, barely visible.

These clover leaves, which is real life were far less impressive, show up much better. I'm pleased with the pictures, as pictures, (I can't tell you how many hundreds of pictures I must have shot of foxtails over the years) but they don't show what I saw.

flowers unknown

I've never seen these growing anywhere before. Many things that don't have names are familiar to me as "that stuff" but not these. I've looked in my Kentucky wildflower books without finding them.

They look a bit like coreopsis, but the leaves of the ones I've grown are not quite like that, and I've never seen coreopsis grow higher than my head!