Garden Mouse

See this old hard left over cob of corn in our garden? Well, we have been watching a tiny charcoal gray mouse as he nibbles and chews at this corn. I have been trying to get a picture of this cute little guy for some time now, but he is just too fast.

Here he is! I finally got a picture and isn't he just as cute as can be? He is sitting very still, thinking he was hiding next to the very bottom of the corn stalk. I had to be extremely still and quiet to get this photo shot. I don't expect him to survive too long, our 14 yr old cat is always hunting and sniffing for such treats as a Garden Mouse. We also have a very pretty stray cat. He has long black fur and very pretty golden eyes. He has been around for almost a year and seems to get braver all the time. So our little garden mouse better be very careful and alert at all times.

This is the last week of September and we still have lots of garden produce. As you can see from this picture, our green beans started blooming and producing again. I just love it when that happens. Like my husband who is originally from the south says, "that's a nice mess of beans." I think with such a hot summer they just go dormant until it cools off and the days get shorter. It has still been getting up in high 80's but cools of to about 45 or 50 degrees at night. We have had quite a few nice cucumbers, bell peppers, and tomatoes too. Yes, we are still eating green fried tomatoes weekly.

We have several nice squash. I love these baked and served with butter, brown sugar, salt and pepper. I remember as a young girl it was always my job on the Fall Sunday mornings before church, to cut in half the squash and take all the seeds out, put it in a pan and in the oven to bake while we were at church. Usually at the same time I was doing that, My mother was preparing a chicken or young rooster with dressing for the oven. When we walked through the door after church, it smelt so good and was ready for the Sunday dinner table.

(dinner was always our noon meal, supper was our evening meal, we always ate meals around the table, together as a family.)

Fall Pumpkins

Tis is one of 4 musk melon, We have already eaten two of these and

they were absolutely sweet and delicious.

This is crisp ruffly kale. We have had plenty this summer and it usually lasts even after the frost, even the hard frost. This is good in salad, cooked or fried with a bit of bacon pieces.
Kale is also very nice to decorate a plate serving of food.

The nice green color and ruffly leaves are very decorative.

This is collard greens. We normally eat these fried in a bit of bacon grease with bacon pieces.
These collard's also last well into fall, after the first few frosts, very hardy plants! I never had greens as a child but my down south husband introduced me to a lot of new foods.

Green fried tomatoes was one of them, and I am glad he did!

I have about 10 big health cauliflower plants but only one has recently started a head of cauliflower. I don't understand why. The plants look gorgeous and about 36" tall.

A kind neighbor of ours brought over a nice box full of ripe juicy pears. They grow here on pear trees but aren't quite as large as those one would buy from a grocery store. When we lived in Germany about 15 years ago, we had a couple pear trees in our yard and they were also Delicious. We also had a Bing Cherry tree and plumb tree. It is so moist in Germany that many things grow nicely.

The same time I was out with my camera trying to get a picture of our Garden Mouse,

our yard squirrel inquisitively came down from a tree and seemed to want his picture taken.

So I obliged him. This is about as close as I can get to him but my husband sometimes gets much closer, but then he doesn't have a camera, right?