July

Summertime, when the living is easy... Bees are buzzin' and the flowers are in full bloom.
We do what we can for the critters on our property.

August

And July fades into:

Which fades into:

September

As part of the pond diversion project, we decided that since we no longer had the little stream going from the pond to the river (its upkeep became too much for us), we also decided the bridge was no longer useful nor warranted.

So Lee asked our neighbor Dean if he knew of someone who would be interested in coming to get it, for the price of removing the big stones we had placed along the stream when we created it. And that is what happened.

So now the bridge belongs to someone else with their little stream; and our plan is to turn the flower beds by the no longer existing stream back into grass. That is just fine with us, as that area was always difficult to maintain because of the river floods that always brought debris and deposited it there.

July and August brought big changes in our pond area. We decided the stream we had created between the pond and the river was becoming too much maintenance for us. It became weed-choked, which made the water overflow into the grass around it, making it very soggy and difficult to mow. So Lee cut off the stream where it came from the pond, and let the stream go dry. Lee worked with our neighbor, Martin, to open the drain from our pond to his, so the overflow from our pond will now go into theirs. Martin was a great help to Lee this year: Lee's hernia made it impossible to rake the "pond snot" out of our pond (that's proabably how he got his hernia). Martin took over and helped keep the pond clean.

On August first, Dot got a scare: her eye doctor thought she was about to have a stroke and sent her to the hospital. After many scans and tests, the neurology team decided that no strokes were imminent, that what was happening in her eyes was probably related to migranes (no headaches). This was the picture she took from her hospital bed the morning, of her release.

September means Autumn, and Autumn means leaf color -- and washing the greenhouse windows!