Hey kids! Would you like your house to smell like vinegar? Have I got the recipe for you!

We had a surprisingly good tomato year this year in our garden. This is extra amazing considering we had a massive hail storm in early July which reduced many of our plants to sticks. The tomatoes bounced back and, boy howdy, did they produce. However, the cold descended before all the tomatoes could ripen. So, we had lots of green tomatoes and didn't have the heart to toss everything on the compost pile.

Oh how I wish I was a highly paid journalism professor at UC-Berkeley. Then I would be blissfully unaware that people have accents in this great nation of ours and have long Sundays of no errands to stand around watching meat braise. AHHH, that would be the life.

Instead we ate leftover fish tonight and roasted vegetable salad and cleaned a few more things out of the refrigerator. Now I'm sitting here watching Glee, thinking about eating graham crackers for dessert and reveling in the fact that we got EcoBaby to eat brussel sprouts. Life's little victories.

A tale of a full moon, a hard frost, green tomatoes and eight dirty ollas.

Getting away for a weekend of camping always seems like a hassle, until the tent is pitched and sleeping bags are unrolled. We were packed and rolling out of town by 3pm on Friday toward a state park about 2.5 hours away which minimized traffic and stress. We also enjoyed the comforts of a developed campsite. True backcountry camping will wait until all family members can carry their own backpack. Clear starry skies, frosty cold mornings, sunny hikes and 48 news-free hours helped to clear our frazzled minds.

Folks around Santa Fe call these flowers Purple Aster when they pop up in late summer / early fall. Apparently Aster bigelovii has quite a few pseudonyms including Bigelow's Tansyaster, Sticky Aster and more scientifically Machaeranthera bigelovii or Dieteria bigelovii var. bigelovii. Regardless of what they're called we have a few of these self-seeded native wildflowers growing in one of the beds around our home.

Our garden attracts a good variety of insect pollinators, including our honeybees. For the past week we've had a new variety of showy, large moths in the garden. They flit about like hummingbirds and are bold, relatively unbothered by human attention. A quick 'Net search revealed that our garden guests are Hyles lineata, the White-lined Sphinx Hummingbird Moth. Of course, now I need to check the tomatoes for hornworms.