Butterflies and Tomatoes

In between, running off trespassers and spectators from the Buick Open urinating in my bushes, we were able to enjoy one male Tiger Swallowtail and three Monarch butterflies.The Tiger Swallowtail was easy to photograph. I stood there for at least 15 minutes as he went from flower to flower. The Monarch butterflies were more skittish but at one time three of them were flying around my head.

If you are interested in Monarch butterflies visit the Monarch Watch site. This site is loaded with all sorts of interesting Monarch info.

Any day now we will have more tomatoes than we can eat. But today we finally got a small taste of what is to come.
The Brown Berry heirloom tomato was listed as a cherry tomato but I think it is too big to be classified as a cherry but it is also too small for a small tomato. When you slice it, it reminds me of a Black Russian style tomato kind of dark green in the center. Taste was so so.

Lordy lordy.....I just noticed I spelled heirloom incorrectly on the paper plate. How embarrassing. I would take another photo but we ate the tomatoes. Sorry my paper plate didn't have spell check.

Fruit on the Trees and on the Ground

I'm at loss for why our fruit will not stay on the trees. R thinks it's because the tree just are not big enough yet to sustain the fruit.

All the peaches, nectarines, and apricots have all dropped off the trees. Apples, plums, and pears are hanging on. The plums are falling but we still have fruit on the trees. The Stanley plums are doing the best of all the plum varieties. The pears have always done well especially the Asian pears. We didn't spray the apples so they are looking bad but at least 50% are still on the trees.

These next photos are of 3 different types of plums. We have a 4th type, Satsuma plum, but the Japanese beetles have had a sweet old time and have destroyed all the fruit and some of the leaves.
20th Century Asian Pear.

Another variety of Asian pear.The next two are Comice and Keiffer but I don't know which is which.
We also have some tomatoes. Earlier in the week we had our first BLT of the year that was made with one of our home grown tomatoes. Despite the unfriendly tomato weather, we did pick two maters this last week. Even though we planted Early Girl, our first tomato was a smallest Mortgage Lifter and an average size Amish Paste tomato. While taking photos today I noticed several more that are starting to turn. Early Girl was not among them. I guess I must have bought the late blooming variety of Early Girl.Either Brown Berry or Grape tomato.