In which we make friends.

Went canoeing on the Santa Fe where a dragonfly befriended us.  It hitched a ride on the gunnel for quite a ways.  
Saw one alligator and one horde of Southerners embarking on a raft of tubes just as a thunderstorm was blowing in.  

Vegetable update: peppers are finally growing.  We had a scare with the first flowers - after blooming they just gave up on life and fell off the plant.  Unsure if they had not been pollinated or if they were over-watered, Andy undertook the job of a bee and pollinated the remaining flowers with a tissue and we stopped watering (it's been raining a lot).  



Something worked or the pepper just decided it was time to make fruit, because now we have several peppers growing quickly.  Jimmy Nardello above and poblano below.  

The bird's eye pepper is more prolific than ever - every level of branching is blanketed by little peppers, flowers, and buds.  This pepper constantly has ants crawling all over it.  I think they are pollinating the flowers.  There is a wasp that likes to hang out on the two bigger peppers, but we have never seen it visit a flower - it must be predatory.  

The cucumbers have been ruthlessly thinned - down to 6 plants plus Petunia, Andy's "special" cucumber that he transplanted during thinning.  The remaining plants are growing like crazy, but haven't put out any flowers yet.    

Tonight we eat our first eggplant.  Alfred feels like an old friend after having watched him and his nose grow and grow.  (The white streaking is from dipel dust running down after a rain - we had problems with caterpillars a couple weeks ago).  

In the backyard, we pulled wild muscadine vines down from the trees and strung them along a clothesline.  There are not many grapes on the vines, but I'm sure the few we do have will be tasty assuming we can get to them before the raccoons do.