BEACH, TOMATOES, BUTTERFLY

We are about a week away from a license. In the meantime, things on the home front continue to capture me and my camera, so humor me. This week there was the long awaited and very welcome event of the annual beach cleaning. I could not wait to get those piles of dead oranges and bamboo off of our beach. (You may remember that this rainy winter the river near Ribera, orange capital of Sicily, overflowed with all the rain and the oranges and river grass came floating out to the sea, eventually deposited in our cove on our beach!). The cleaning couldn’t have happened on a more beautiful day.
We loved watching it from our beach chairs and even if the water was a little too chilly for more than a brief swim, we read our books on the beach for the afternoon. It was actually in the 60’s in the morning here, while the poor relatives in the Dunkirk/Buffalo area sweated in 90 degree weather. Sorry about that-dad, welcome back from the hospital.
Anyway, the garden had a few high and low moments this week. Those wonderful plum tomatoes? From which I thought I could make tons of salsa, ragu, pomodori secchi (sun-dried tomatoes, my favorite!)? They started beautifully but ended with blossom end rot! It was probably started by overwatering and was helped by too high a dose of composted sheep shit. The books also point to lack of calcium, so we withheld water, added plain dirt, and fed them with milk after three days. The Tomato Queen of Virginia Beach helped out a lot (thanks Chris!) but it looks like half of them are going to be bad. Such is life, I guess. And just this week I received another food gift, a large bottle of sun-dried tomatoes from Michele’s (our driver) mother. So what if they are not MY tomatoes? The red peppers in the planters seem to be doing well though. They too had a healthy dose of sheep compost. We shall see.
The 21 shots of the butterfly in the garden this morning yielded a few good one. Enjoy!