Neighbors

Start at the back door to see:
--Tiger swallowtails and a monarch sharing the butterfly bushes and a hot pink zinnia.
--By 8 a.m. sun like a spotlight on the orangey red zinnias, cosmos, blackeyed susans, and echinacea in the back corner. (The year is turning around: A few weeks ago the sun arrived at 7:30.)
--Hummingbird swooping past the butterfly bush and up into a hemlock two yards away
Moving to the front yard, don't miss the bumble bees, and an occasional honey bee (suggesting a nearby beekeeper?).
Head down the street to the next corner and startle goldfinches who rise, twittering, out of a neighbor's mass of echinacea going to seed.
Further down the street, pause to admire the Sri Lankan monks' peppers and beets growing neatly at the feet of a statue of the Buddha meditating tranquilly in a 50 year old American suburban lawn.

Eating Summer

Thursday evening, on my way to meet my knitting pals, I stopped at the Penn Quarter Farmers' Market and bought nectarines, peaches, and green beans from Maryland and Pennsylvania farmers.
Saturday morning I went off to the Kensington Farmers' Market again. I came home with tomatoes, eggplant, yellow squash, peppers, blueberries, and more peaches, all from Maryland. Then I went to MOM and got some local zucchini and mushrooms from Pennsylvania, as well as some Maryland Cherry Glen goat cheese.
I've been eating peaches, nectarines, and/or blueberries with Greek-style yogurt and a little granola every morning. I had a tomato and some goat cheese for lunch.
Tonight for our dinner I'll make some version of ratatouille, perhaps with polenta, and some garlicky green beans on the side. (And a little California wine!)

Signs of summer

Watching an Eastern Swallowtail on the butterfly bush.
Buying peaches and tomatoes at the Saturday morning farmers' market in Kensington.
Sitting in the shade of a pale lavender crape myrtle in bloom, listening to the cicadas.
Buying a few last plants for the summer garden and deciding that it was too hot to stay outside and plant them.
Reading the forecast for Sunday and hoping the rain doesn't start until after I've planted things in the morning.

Summer in the backyard

I've neglected this blog, but I've been inspired to revisit it as part of a convergence of interests: knitting and ordinary nature. By "ordinary" I mean what's here next to us wherever we are, visible every day if only we look.
So where does the knitting come in? Well, I've started reading Michele Rose Orne's book Inspired to Knit. Her designs are a bit frou-frou for me, but her process intrigues me enough that I've joined the related knitalong. The idea is to create our own seasonal "mood boards", starting with summer, with a view to using them as inspiration for our own knitting designs . She suggests collages of things torn from magazines, found objects, etc. I just took my coffee out to the back step and sat a while.
Here's what I've noticed so far:

• Summer here is hot. The strong sunlight calls for strong colors--zinnia shades, not sweet pastels.
  
  
• At this point in the summer everything is overgrown.
• There are beautifully striped black swallowtail caterpillars on the bronze fennel, and all sorts of bees on the mint blossoms.
  
  
• Butterflies in flight include Eastern swallowtail, Cabbage white, Buckeye, various skippers.
  
  
• Flocks of goldfinches (more black and yellow!) visit the zinnias for the seeds.