Tater scale

Things have been busy.
Things have been good.
I'm doing a lot of teaching
And a lot less with food.

What kind of poem is that?

I got this from a student family this week.  We cooked it on Monday and have been eating it ever since.

This picture has not been manipulated in any way (I did make it black and white, because the color version was a little too vibrant), I am holding the biggest sweet potato I've ever seen right beside my head. 

Fruit

We found a berry patch very close to us. It was a really nice morning on Saturday and its blue- and blackberry season, so we took advantage. It is a beautiful property where they grow flowers and berries to sell. Heaven? Maybe, but we were in and out pretty easily. Heaven on Wye Mountain, at least.
I'm sure there was more than I realized, but I saw blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, sunflowers, zinnias, and black-eyed susans. And huge white hollyhocks covering the electric meter! And on top of all that, their personal garden was beautiful!
First we started at the blueberries.Blueberries are so easy to pick. You just kinda shake the branch and gently pull and before you know it:They are so good, and big!

Then we headed over to the blackberries:

These were easier to pick than the last blackberries I picked.


We froze these:

But I have been using these:
For fruit pops! They are so good!



And for smoothies!
And for muffins that I forgot to take pictures of!


For you cat-lovers, this is what kitty does when it is so hot:
Looks all dejected and like he collapsed in front of the a/c unit.

What a difference a day makes; Turf wars

It's been more than a day, but things are starting to get back to normal around here. One of the roads that one might take to get to our house is completely flooded. I was amazed by it so I took a picture. Don't worry, a quick and easy detour is all we needed to get around, but this is what it looks like.

Garden trouble:
I planted green beans and tomatoes in the garden last week and I found a few places where we had fire ants. We have declared war and we are going to kill them. I avoided planting close to the mounds so we haven't had any plant loss yet. (If we did have plant loss from these plants, we have more seedlings that we would probably toss anyways. We'll hang on to them to see what happens.)
So far we have tried two insecticide-free remedies. Here is the second one. Nate pulled up the weed fabric and dug up the nest. The ultimate goal when exterminating a nest is to get the queen, and eliminate her (I have never spoken in such a militaristic manner about anything). We aren't sure if we did that, but he dug until he quit seeing larva.
I'll pause for you to gag a bit. Or say your "Blah"s and "Blech"s.
Are you ok now?
Ok.
So anyways. He dug until he didn't see any more of those. What he dug he put in these buckets, which were then filled with soapy water in order to drown the ants quickly (see? I've never said words like this before). This morning they had burrowed into that hole again, but I think we'll try soaking it with scalding water again and hope that kills a lot of them off.
See? It's not all rainbows and sunshine around here.

Daffodil Festival

I went here when Nate went into work over the weekend. It was awesome. I'll save you the narrative, it's pretty self-explanatory.
My favorite. I think it is whimsical: