[Mike Nolan]

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.

[Mike Nolan]

We had take-out salads from Amigos, with some low-carb adjustments.

[Mike Nolan]

What's available? Fresh from your garden would be best, farmer's market a second best choice, fruit and veg stands #3, and then whatever you can find at the grocery store, preferably locally sourced. The further they have to travel, the more likely they are to be picked while still somewhat green and 'ripened', which adds color but IMHO not much flavor.

I've been buying the 'tomatoes on the vine' ones at the store since last season, those seem to be the most likely to taste like a tomato. Smaller store-bought tomatoes tend to be better than bigger ones, too.

[Mike Nolan]

That must have been a pretty big file, Joan. I think I've got the limits set at 1280 x 1280 pixels.

[Mike Nolan]

I picked two 5-ounce tomatoes this evening, so we had tuna salad on tomato. I think these were Celebrity, I've got several Italian Heirloom that should be ripe possibly this week or early next week, they're about softball size.

[Mike Nolan]

I have heard that a few schools start up in July, but I don't think any of them do in Nebraska. A few years back people were proposing a year-round schedule with 3 or 4 breaks of 2-3 weeks each. It never gained traction.

When the schools open up, the pools close, because the lifeguards are all back in school. Unfortunately, the heat usually sticks around until mid-September.

I had a tomato-salami-turkey sandwich and a small salad tonight, Diane had hard boiled eggs.

[Mike Nolan]

We had burgers on the grill (I had an Aldi keto bun with mine, Diane did not), the toppings included one of the first full-sized tomatoes from our garden.

I also had a small salad and she had the last of the cantaloupe.

[Mike Nolan]

When I make banana mini-muffins, I wind up freezing most of them and they're great right out of the freezer. Bigger muffins might need a bit of defrosting to avoid being hard to bite into.

The chocolate zucchini bread I was making last summer was pretty good straight out of the freezer, too. (I didn't plant any zucchini this year, in part because we got tired of finding things to make with them last year, and most of those recipes wouldn't be very keto-friendly.)

[Mike Nolan]

I made a pizza tonight using the King Arthur Keto Wheat Baking Flour. A 30 gram 'serving' of that flour is 8 carbs, 4 net carbs. By comparison regular AP flour is 23 carbs in a 30 gram serving.

It was pretty good, not sure I would have known it was keto-friendly. I cut it into 8 slices, each slice was 12 carbs for the crust (8 net) and 4 carbs for the toppings. It came out fairly thin (that's good, we like thin-crust pizza) with a pretty good mouth feel. Next time I might let it rise a bit longer, though.

It didn't want to stretch or roll into a 12 inch circle as the recipe suggested, it came out a bit more rectangular.

Toppings were tomato sauce, sliced tomato, artichoke hearts, mushrooms, Genoa salami, mozzarella cheese, cream cheese and some Parmesan.

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[Mike Nolan]

I bought some inexpensive canning lids on Amazon that probably came from China, so far I've had pretty good luck with them. I wouldn't be surprised if Ball's aren't made in the USA anymore, though.

[Mike Nolan]

We had an appointment this morning and drove across town, lots of branches down and quite a few trees snapped off. Some traffic lights still not working. Lincoln's well field on the Platte lost power, but is 3/4 restored already, though they're asking people not to water their lawns until Saturday. We only got 1/4 inch of rain, but the high heat is gone, at least for a day, so we shouldn't need to water anything.

Omaha got hit harder than we did, still thousands without power there.

[Mike Nolan]

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.

[Mike Nolan]

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.

[Mike Nolan]

We had tacos/taco salad and some cantaloupe.

A storm blew through Lincoln this evening, with sustained wind in the 50's and gusts as high as 83 by the airport. Other than a lot of leaves and twigs down, we don't appear to have had any damage here, but there are trees down all over town and plenty of roof damage.

[Mike Nolan]

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.

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