The button bush is blooming down by the creek, and the humming birds and native bees (we're not seeing many honeybees here this year) are loving it. There's not much else in bloom right now, although it's still summer wildflower season--only a few black-eyed Susans, blue ruellia, and some early sunflowers. Between the drought (the last significant rain was May 16) and the blistering heat (100+ days since mid-May, with only a couple of days relief), everything is pretty well baked, broiled, or fried. The creek is dropping fast, and the emerging mudbanks are covered with coon tracks: they're feasting on small fish and crawfish. The baby bunnies have graduated from their nest to my garden, and Mother Rabbit has already started on her next family, judging from the erotic hanky-panky in the front yard. Oh, and the mesquite trees are bearing a bumper crop of beans, which the deer, raccoons, and rabbits eat with great relish. Summer moves along, in all its lovely symmetries.
Fall Garden Report. I learned a long time ago that there's not much point in gardening here in Central Texas in the summer, so I'm investing my gardening energies in the coming fall garden, and next spring. I have a new raised bed, and am planning four more. 
Those are my compost bins you see in the background (one slightly leaning) and a few straggly squash that won't amount to anything in this heat. Compost is my major summer crop, and I'm glad to report that it's cookin' up a storm, thanks to major contributions from the ladies up the road, Texas and Blossom, our two cows.
Since this photo was taken, we've added a chicken-wire fence (recycled wire from my chicken pens of a decade ago) and mulch over the top of this bed to keep the weeds down until planting time (early September). I've been inspired by Pam Price's "National Victory Garden Revival" website and blog: read it and think about it. And by Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which is near the top of my all-time favorite reads. I find myself agreeing with Kingsolver, Price, and the others who are saying that it is time to get serious about growing as much of our own food as we can, to reduce the food miles. At our house, we're already veggie-once-a-week and all-but-veggie three or four days a week, but we want to do more. The closest farmers' market is a 60-mile round trip, and trucking back and forth every week just doesn't make sense for us. So it's back to the garden, in a serious way. You'll hear more from me about this.
Book Report. I logged almost 10,000 words this week on The Tale of Applebeck Farm, the holiday and a visit to the dentist notwithstanding. I have to start paying attention to rounding up all the vagrant plots in this very busy book. Next week, jury duty. (Our county is so small (population-wise) that almost everybody gets a summons once a year, or at least, I do.) Good news for all you Robin Paige fans (and for us, too): all the books will shortly be available on Kindle and on Sony's reader. So if you can't find them on the bookstore shelves, you can easily download them.
Reading note. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.--Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food