#WeekendCoffeeShare: Gardens and Rivers

Good morning and come on in on this rainy Sunday!  Ugh. Chilly and damp. One of my clearest childhood memories is that every Sunday it seemed to rain.  If not raining, the sky was overcast like it is now, streets were wet and all you heard was the sound of blue jays screaming back and forth. Depressing and lonely.

So. Let’s just stuff that not so great memory back into the corners of my mind. How are you?  Come on in and I’ll pour you a cup.

I cannot believe we are almost halfway through July. How has your summer gone? We have only camped two holiday weekends and I’ve only ridden my motorcycle once. I have gotten in some paddling though. Yesterday I did a river cleanup with a group on Ecorse Creek. Every time I do these, I cannot believe the amount of trash we pull out.

I have another event next Saturday, and this time we’ll be clearing log jams. I ordered some waders for the occasion but they are more of the wetsuit variety.  So I returned them and placed another Amazon order for another pair.  I’m glad to help keep clearing this river, it is a water trail the Friends of the Rouge is trying to develop, and I’m grateful to have somewhere close to home to paddle.

We had some nice weather on Friday, not too hot, and I spent it doing the final clean up in my garden. I have silver maples that drop helicopters everywhere, so I plucked the last of them out of the garden and also did some weeding. We’ve had tons of rain, so that has really made everything flourish.

My pepper plants aren’t very big but I was happy to see I got a few Hungarian wax peppers. I’m especially tickled because these are the children of last years peppers. I saved the seeds as I harvested them.

In the wildflower garden, which has been taken over with milkweed, I noticed a new plant growing. I texted a pics to my green thumb brother and sisters to see if they’d seen it before. My brother thought it might be a bush bean plant. My sister asked if it was a volunteer. My interpretation of that was, did it come from birds crapping in your garden? I was right!  That is how I got my daisies and also my mulberry seedlings that are popping up everywhere. (Thank you birds!) So I’ll keep an eye on this and see what it does. If the leaves are edible, you could use them for tortillas, they are that huge.

In the front yard, on the topic of maple trees, look what I noticed!

Actually, I noticed two things. First, the new sprout. Gary Wilson, if you are reading, this reminded me of your story about the seedling!

The second thing is that in the below picture, our tree looks like a hand with an amputated thumb! We’ve only been in this house 17 years..  Haha.

Well, I must be going.. I have a pretty decent list of things to wrap up today.  I hope you had a great week and I look forward to stopping by your corner of the blogosphere.  Thanks, as always, to Natalie, for hosting our weekend coffee share!