Just in time for the first day of summer, the temperature hit 100 degrees last week. We had three days of temperatures in the upper 90s, before settling back down to the 80s for the weekend.  Saturday night there were fireworks and we rode our bikes up to the park to see them. A pretty perfect summer weekend if you ask me.

Saturday morning I decided the peas had to go. When I laid out my plans for the garden this year, I decided to plant my tomatoes in front of the peas so that when the peas came out the tomatoes could be trained up the pea trellises. Going by the days to maturity printed on the seed packets this should have worked perfectly, but the peas were slowpokes this year. So six of my tomato plants have been limping along in the shadows of the six foot tall blue podded peas and sugar snaps. The blue podded peas were just beginning to dry out, and ideally they should be left on the vine to dry out completely. But those poor little tomatoes needed more space and more light, so I ripped out the pea vines and now they’re hanging upside down from the rafters to finish drying out.

And when I got a closer look at the tomato plants, I discovered the first tomatoes of the year, two tiny little sweet pea currant tomatoes.

This weekend we also noticed dozens of little husks on the tomatillo plants. The husks grow first and then the fruits develop inside them.

This morning the first of the squash blossoms opened. It’s a female flower and there aren’t any male flowers yet, so unless there’s another  blooming elsewhere in the garden it probably  wasn’t pollinated. But all of the squash plants are growing fast and are poised to take over the garden,  so I know it won’t be long before there are plenty of blossoms.

The beans are all beginning to flower and tiny bean pods are beginning to appear. These are Lina Cisco’s Bird Egg Bean, a name I just couldn’t resist.

I like to let dill come up where ever it wants to in the garden. That way I always have plenty of dill for pickles, and there’s enough to share with the swallowtail butterfly caterpillars. One of my favorite sights in the summer garden is dill flowering all over the place. There’s something about those umbels that I just love.

Is summer in full swing where you are are?