Today's Post Brought To You By The Letter B: Bob, Backyard, Butterfly

It's been quite a while since I posted an update on skinny ol' Bob, the stray cat who adopted us in July.  It's hard to get a good picture of him because he doesn't look up when you talk to him and doesn't like to make eye contact.  But he's as sweet a cat as ever and is finally starting to look more like a cat than a bag of bones.  Still, I'd like to see him put on a little more weight before winter gets here.

And since we're outside, lets take a look at what's still growing in the backyard.

We have lots of big, bushy tomato plants left, but because of the heat and drought, they just didn't do as well this year as they have in the past.  We're still getting 3-4 small tomatoes a day, though.

This bunch of collard greens was strictly volunteer.  It didn't do much of anything until we started getting rain again, then it took off.  I'm just going to leave it there for a while, since they are said to be sweeter after a frost.

We planted and harvested (dry) pinto beans earlier in the summer and then replanted with green beans.  They are just now starting to set beans on, so hopefully we'll get a few jars' worth.  The ones we planted with the corn (in a Three Sisters planting) didn't do anything.

Kat still has two large Moon and Stars watermelons in her garden.  We already picked three.
You can see the stars on the rinds and the leaves, but none have had spots big enough to call moons.

The squashes we planted as part of the Three Sisters planting fared better.  We were late getting them in, but I think they will ripen before we get frost.  I can see several butternuts like the one above and several acorn squashes.  The zucchini plants gave us a few, but we weren't overrun with zukes like we usually are.

These last pics are of a butterfly (or is it a moth of some sort?) that Bob was chasing and that Kat rescued from him.  It seemed stunned, but unhurt.She and Shane were able to hold it for a while until it finally walked up Kat's arm and flew away.