My larger tomato varieties aren't doing much yet, though I've got a bunch of Italian Heirloom that are good sized but probably 2 weeks away from starting to ripen, they're a slow variety. Those plants didn't get very big or leafy, so I'm worried about sun scald.

I don't think the seeds that were sold as First Lady II are that variety, not the first time I've had issues with getting those seeds. Time to look for a different variety, maybe Defiant, which is supposed to have a good yield of 6-8 ounce tomatoes for a deteminant variety, and I know they're flavorful. (Diane got 100 pounds of them from a UNL test garden a few years ago, the grad student running that test plot was picking 1000 pounds of them a day for several weeks, but she had two 160 foot rows of them.)

But I did pick 25 ounces of 4th of July and Porter tomatoes today, the Porters are a bit larger than grape tomatoes, usually around .75 ounces each, the 4th of July ones are usually 1.5-1.75 ounces.

Too early to tell if we'll get a bumper crop in late August and September, which is when the peak has been in recent years. It's been really hot and I need some cool mornings for fruit to set. Usually there's a cool spell in mid-August, but the long range forecast doesn't show one yet.

I'm hoping to get enough tomatoes to make several batches of tomato sauce and relish, hopefully with Amish Paste tomatoes, I've still got tomato juice left over from last season, so that's a lower priority this year.

The Italian Heirloom tomatoes make great tomatoes for stuffing them with tuna salad.

We had a refrigerator in the basement fail earlier this year. Nothing of consequence was lost, fortunately.

When I went to Lowes to replace it, I found one that can switch between refrigerator and freezer mode. That made it easy for me to handle defrosting two freezers that were in serious need of being defrosted. Currently it's in refrigerator mode, but not very full.

A year ago my son gave me several Govee temperature/humidity sensors for Christmas. Since then I've added more of them, we now have sensors in the refrigerators and freezers as well as several room around the house. (They will alert me if the temperature goes above or below a defined range for that sensor.) Two weeks ago I added some outdoor sensors on the back patio and front porch. It is interesting to watch the temperature variances around the house throughout the day, inside and out.

Most of the sites on growing fruit trees say that peach trees are self-pollinating but will produce more fruit if there is another peach tree nearby. Weather and other factors can lead to non-bearing years, though.

To make things even more confusing, while some fruit trees are self-unfruitful or have sterile pollen, meaning they need another tree to produce any fruit at all, for some self-unfruitful trees it has to be the same variety (genetically speaking) while for others it needs to be a different variety.

The heat wave we've had for the last several weeks broke Monday evening, the high on Monday was around 104, but it was in the low 60's by7 AM and the high on Tuesday was in the high 70's. I don't see a lot of 90-degree days in the long range guesses, either.

So it looks like my tomato plants will be setting fruit for a late August/September tomato bounty.

I put in 6 spaghetti squash plants and am starting to see fruit, but I probably won't have to harvest for another month. The plants love to climb so I put them to the west of the west-most tomato cages.

Diane is usually so-so on spaghetti squash, but when I told her to look up the keto numbers on it, she seemed a little more interested.

The spaghetti squash lasagna sounds interesting, I like making lasagna with spinach, ricotta, ground beef and mushrooms, just have to figure out how big a pan to use for one spaghetti squash.