Cooler weather today meant I could finally cleanup the backyard garden. I can’t believe how hardy pepper plants are. Most were still alive despite a few months of zero irrigation.

I got a new stand-alone camera. I had forgotten just how powerful choosing your own f-stop is. Makes iPhone cameras feel cramped as they get faster and faster in the pursuit of “more light.”

Our first grosbeak sighting! This is a Black-headed Grosbeak. It is eating our cultivated California native grapes.

Mockingbirds love our cultivated native grapes 🥰 It’s the best seeing them swallow a large grape whole. We’ve seen at least five in our backyard. They mostly get along. We have a kind of neutral zone

We started pickling two almost full pint jars of Santa Fe peppers today. Turns out they’re not great for hot sauce as their flesh is pretty thin and they’re very seedy.

So many ripe Serranos & other varieties. This is hands down our best year for peppers. It has taken many years of trial and error to get here. Hot sauce here we come! (Yes, we are eating some fresh). Oh and it’s fig season!🌱

Edible garden update: we continue to harvest lots of red & ripe peppers for hot sauce. The tomatoes are basically done for the season at 195 tomatoes weighing in at 34 pounds. We froze most. And finally, our figs are starting to ripen and we’re on nectarine watch 2021🌱

Because of Safari’s new clearly bad UI changes, I’m not installing the public iOS and MacOS betas. Just listening to people talk about the new UI makes me cringe. I’m super excited about Focus though.

Covered up the avocados again in advance of today’s 110°F weather. Every time we do this it gets simpler and better. Wrapping the sheet around a ladder is genius.

Windows 11 requires UEFI firmware. I use VMWare Fusion 12 Player (free) for Windows 10. Seems only VMWare Fusion 12 Pro can change firmware from BIOS to UEFI. Maybe VMWare will be nice and enable the UEFI option for Windows 11’s reqs. firmware = “efi” works not.