I'm in the brief but wonderful period when I have late strawberries, early red raspberries and black raspberries all at once, enough for a small bowl of mixed berries every day for a week or so.  I'm fixing a batch of baked stuffed zucchini tonight for dinner and for freezing, using my own squash and onions and basil and smothering with last year's tomato sauce.

Spring peas are only now on their last legs, and they produced incredibly abundantly, so I've been blanching and freezing a lot for winter.  Planted a new batch for fall, and I'm anxiously waiting for them to germinate.

Trying a new/old variety of early sweetcorn called Dorinny, which has shocked me by putting up tassels and sprouting silk already when the stalks are less than 5 feet.  If it's good corn, I'll be real happy to have found it because I get so much wind that it often knocks down the real tall varieties at some point during the summer.

I was able to pick my first cherry tomato of the season today and moaned with pleasure at how good it tasted, but I'm fighting a rearguard battle with that old debbil early blight, the plague of wet cool summers, to try to fend it off long enough to get a decent crop from my slicing and paste tomatoes.  I wasn't aggressive enough with it last year, and every one of my plants defoliated and then collapsed on the ground before more than about half the fruit ripened.

I'm clipping off the lower branches this year as soon as a leaf starts to show any sign of blight, which seems to be slowing its progress, but it's still a race to see whether the tomatoes will ripen before the plant is consumed by the disease.    At this point, all my plants look like they've had a "Brazilian," they're so naked at the bottom.

Percy Thornton works seven acres and is... 99 years old.

No joke!

God's Bounty

Percy Thornton sits in the shade behind his vegetable stand sorting beets. Slowly and methodically, he gathers six beets that dangle from leafy stalks and ties them together with twine he snips off with a small pocketknife.

After he has a nice pile, he puts them on "Percy's Self-Service" stand on Troyer Road in White Hall. In a day or two, the beet bunches will be gone and Thornton will find a mound of dollar bills inside the stand's locked metal box with a slot in the top.

Thornton -- who says he will turn 99 on Sept. 9 but some relatives believe it is his 100th birthday -- never knows if people overpaid, underpaid or simply walked off with the fruits of his labors.

But he knows he hasn't seen the last of those beets.

"Some of my customers will pickle 'em, then bring those beets back and give 'em to me," Thornton says. "I have lovely, honest customers who treat me right because I treat them the way the Lord wants. God is keeping me alive for a reason. I used to preach at church. Now I preach at the stand."

His preaching style is more "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord" than fire and brimstone. It's not his back-breaking work that produced lush vegetables and fruits, he says. It's God's work.

A few people simply want to buy tomatoes, watermelons, corn or squash and be on their way. They zip in, slide money in the slot and leave without a sermon; without a word to or from Thornton.

But most customers flock to the stand for produce with a promise of paradise.

"We started as customers 18 or 19 years ago, and over time we've gotten to know Percy as a friend," says Dick Hebrank, of White Hall, who brought his wife, Marge, and daughter, Deb. On this particular day they arrive with Marge's homemade applesauce and a pineapple-upside-down cake. "We see him at least once a week now and we'll just sit for a few hours talking, even in the winter. He is a gracious man."

Thornton's poor hearing is his only concession to age as he approaches the century mark. He spends all day, every day from spring through fall working 7 acres off Troyer Road.

Tomatoes are his best-sellers, so this year he put in 300 plants that he started from seeds saved from last year's crop.

He is mighty proud of his sweet corn, just starting to form tassels in mid-July. Towering sunflowers provide shade for his cucumbers, and row after straight row of plants sprout kale, carrots, beets, cabbage, onions, potatoes, beans, peas, broccoli, watermelon, cantaloupe, pumpkins and squash.

Each year, he jump-starts his stand by buying produce from a friend on the Eastern Shore, but as soon as his plot starts producing, everything on the stand belongs to Thornton. He visits grocery stores to check prices and then sets his a few pennies below.

"There's not a lot of profit, and if elderly or poor come around, I'll give them vegetables for nothing," he says. "I live a good, clean life and I try not to overcharge. It's that simple."

Crowley fails to say what Whalen then said as she could then presumably see the man was the next door resident.

Whalen probably said she thought the man in the house was Gates. That would explain why Crowley didn't have his weapon drawn but still needed to identify who the man was.

No matter what, Gates could have id'd himself and Crowley would have been on his way. Instead Gates threw a hissy fit and tried to dis Crowley off by telling him he (Gates) knew people in high places.

Crowley most likely wanted him out of the house, after the "I know people" threat by Gates so that there would be witnesses.