This morning is overcast and cool, with some pleasant breeze. We’re still not getting rain, yet there is beauty everywhere.

On Monday I got a “new” vintage lens: a Minolta 135mm 2.8 MC-Rokkor, which I adapted to my Canon R6 and took out shooting around the food forest and garden.

The chaste trees are back in bloom:

And the sugarcane is coming in, despite the very dry weather. We won’t get great yields, but the sweetness is excellent.

Sugarcane is so beautiful I don’t understand why it isn’t grown as an ornamental in landscaping.

The pokeweed is going to seed. We don’t eat them, but I like to have them on the homestead as a chop-and-drop plant.

The Jerusalem artichokes are in bloom now, cheerfully pressing on through the drought.

And the compost pile pumpkin vine has decided to create at least a dozen new pumpkins around the edges of the garden.

It’s amazing how long this vine has lasted – and how much it’s yielding!

The sunn hemp didn’t get nearly as thick and tall as it did when we planted it last year, probably due to the extreme heat and lack of water. Yet it’s covered the garden with lovely blooms.

And speaking of blooms, the bees really love the African blue basil. It’s always a-buzz with activity.

A common weed here is the railroad vine, which I like to see in the wild but not so much in our gardens.

Another lovely red flower that is appearing everywhere now is the spider lily. They disappear through the summer and then shoot up flowers in the fall, followed by leaves that persist through the winter and spring.

God is good. Even the “weeds” have beauty.