Wednesday's First Blog......

I am so glad to have this tree down.  It bothered me to look up and see the skeleton of a dead tree in the yard. I should think a watering pan for the birds would work well on top of this stump.

I don't think this kind of tree intends to live very long.  It is the same kind of tree that the Minnesota companies use to plant for paper making. They grow fast in a few years and they take them in and process them. I bought it as a fast growing tree really not thinking.  I should have known better. The rings on the trunk really may be uncountable as it is such a soft tree.

The rose hips on the wild rose are so much larger than usual this year.  I keep mentioning that we didn't have any hot and dry weather to discourage them from developing in a healthy manner.

As an afterthought I placed a morning glory seedling next to the blue gate.  It has struggled but I am betting I will see blooms soon.  There are buds and the vines have really filled in for me on the fence.

I pick them green as I sometimes don't return in enough time to pick them ripe.  I mentioned earlier that a ripe roma drops to the ground whenever it choses. I have to hunt in the grass for them if it is tall grass. The quality of the flavor of this years tomatoes is so great.  Last years tomatoes were so watery tasting with little flavor.  I do have steak tomatoes but I happened to be in the patch where the romas were really starting to turn.












It is Wednesday and reaching the middle of the week does seem like it is an accomplishment. I appreciate your stopping by today.

Tuesday's Things.......

My blogger friends identified this as a skipper.  I have never seen nor photographed one before this year. I don't know why they have just showed up in the garden befor but there are many of them eating on the sedum blooms.

After researching this one, I find that it is a silver spotted skipper.  I may have seen these before but I have never identified them before.  It is a toss up as to which kind is larger in numbers as the one above or this larger one. There are so many of them.

Dry weather usually destroys the sedum in the garden and this is the first year that it has bloomed so profusely for a long time. I really didn't know they had so much nectar.  The bumblebees and honey bees are also very interested in the sedum.

I had one monarch still floating around last evening in the area.  I didn't see any more of them but I didn't stay out for so long as the mosquitoes were biting.

Fading flowers can still have a partial beauty to them.  I don't have any coneflowers left in full bloom but these pastel-looking ones are still showing off as pink flowers.

I laid two of my partially ripened tomatoes in my wheel barrel of bark and sticks.  I like the contrast of the smooth skin of the tomatoes with the roughness of the bark. I pick the tomatoes early as I don't want the insects eating on them.  I know if they start to ripen that I can bring them inside to finish up the ripening process.


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It is a busy week already as this is Homecoming week in the high school.  The middle school doesn't participate so much but they still get excited about all the things that are happening. We had toilet paper draped all over the trees this morning in the school parking lot.  A tradition done by schools in Iowa for Homecoming week.  It makes the kids a little crazy and it takes more work to keep them on task.

I thank you for stopping by today.  Have a great day.

Monday Mentions..........

Clear skies this morning and it is cold.  The rain predicted this afternoon will probably change this look that we have right now.

The monarchs were fluttering yesterday as they seem to be having a small migration in the yard.  In the years past we would have thousands of them but weather pattern changed and they started to follow the Missouri River which is way west of us.  I assume everyone knows they are headed to Mexico.

As they would feed on the sedum they would open up their wings as if they needed to correct their balance.  This guy is a little beat up with his white lines on him.  I also didn't tell you, that there were only about 7 of them out there at the time Sunday afternoon.

I was running short of photos, so having these guys show up helped me fill up the storage file.  I had trouble with macro on them as they would move and the macro took too long to set up to catch them in the opened position. I have a few interesting motion shots of them that I will share along the way.

On Saturday my wife helped me to paint over some raw wood on the porch addition.  I haven't finished the roof here un the porch addition but it was good to get paint on the new stuff and fresh paint on the old parts of the porch. I will paint the trellis this fall after the frost has taken out the morning glory plants.

It was good to get some of these outside jobs done.  I also cleared up the mess from the fallen small tree in my yard.  I have lots of wood to share with people who might want a bonfire.

I am back in the classroom again teaching literacy and grammar.  I had to take home the book to read the days assignment.  I got it done while watching PBS coverage of the 9/11 event that took place 15 years ago.

I hope all are well today.  Thank you for stopping by today.

Sunday's Morning Sun......

As I was taking the shot I thought how great it is that I will get to see a new jet stream being made.  I waited a few minutes and realized that it was not a jet stream but a passenger jet that reflected light of a passenger jet. It probably came out of Des Moines and could be headed to Omaha or even Denver. Colorado. 

I gave away a few more tomatoes today.  They seem to be slow in their ripening but that works good for us. I pick some of them while they are green to keep them from being invaded by bugs. They ripen quickly in the house.

The larger tomato sliced up to look like this.  I add sugar to my slices and my wife likes to add a little salt. It is nice to have them to eat every noon and evening meal. I take them to school to eat out my lunch bag.

It warmed up this afternoon and is a very pleasant day.  I hope everyone has a great day.  Thanks for stopping by today.

Saturday's Morning Sky.......

It is cold this morning and the color of the sky looks a lot more like fall.  We were 55 degrees F. this morning and it will not be warmed to a good temperature until this afternoon.

The pink sedum is looking so perfect this year.  I tied up the branches this year to keep them upright.  I do think that our frequent rains kept the plant so green that I now have perfect blooms. I like the star shaped small flowers of this plant.

I am showing another shot of the burning bush with its healthy set of berries on the shrub.  This shrub really is one of the first to start to change colors in September.  I do get a few yellow leaves that drop off of the river birch and land in the grass.

It is nice to see a few more blooms hanging on for me to see. They seem to be failing a lot sooner this year but they did bloom earlier this spring.  With the air so cold I won't be working outside this morning.  I have some painting to do on some boards that I replaced on the side porch.  I still need to finish picking up logs and sticks from one of the trees that the guys cut down for me. It was the smaller one of the two and I need to trim off the dead branches and pile up the logs that the one guy cut up of the tree.   It is so nice to have those two dead trees out of there. 

We are eaded to the bookstore for a while and will be home to work all afternoon. I hope everyone is having a good day today.  Thanks for stopping by today.

Gray Skies Abound.........

I worked really hard not to include my two dead trees in the garden.  Whenever I took shots I avoided them and yet I knew there were one or two shots in my archive that had parts of the trees in the photos.

I can now snap pictures like this and the dead trees are not in the photo. This is a blurry one from my phone camera but I did want to share what one good thing happened yesterday.

No trees are in sight. They came down in the afternoon with the help with a neighbor guy and his friend.  They cut the down just so as to not land on my house or garden shed.  Some of the bushes around them took direct hits but I think they will grow back in the places that got destroyed.

I now have a large stump in which I can place something.  It is too low for a bird feeder but I could make something decorative to put on top of it.  "Maybe I should get a large Roman sculpture," he said with sarcasm.

The smaller tree lays on the ground cut up in sections.  I told the guys that I would take care of it myself as the big one was so much work.  My wife and I raked up all the mess and burned it last night after they had taken away all the big chunks of tree to another burn pile on one of the guys property.  A big tree that had been dead for a while left a lot of broken sticks in our driveway. I probably will try to burn that small stump up as I do want to mow in that area.

I may make a sign to tell people that there is free firewood available.  People who camp or have home bonfires might help take this away.  I can have bonfires too if I have to after 6:00 in the evening.

It is good to have a Friday every once in a while. I am ready for another break from school. I do have a couple of projects to get done over the weekend and I hope it doesn't rain for very long.  Thank you for stopping by today.

Thursday's Sunny Day

It has rained off and  on for almost 24 hours.  It was foggy and gray when I first went outside.  Barney didn't want to go out in the dark so 20 minuets later he did go out and I captured some daylight.

The rain helped to get these two buds opened.  The other old bud finally shed all of its petals onto the ground. I shared a similar photo on my Photo a Day blog.

In 1983 Woodward, Iowa had its 100th birthday.  A local man, Dennis Adams, created a watercolor painting and proceeded to put a similar image of it on this brick wall. I don't remember when he returned to repaint it the second time but this summer he took the summer to give a third refresher coverage of paint. The first year that he did the work he used a lot of my high school art students to do a lot of the basic labor of under layers of paint.

On the day that he finished, I happened to catch him doing final details on this corner of the mural.  I don't remember him having so much detail that is shown now.  I know if I were repainting something I would add extra stuff.



The town was established by the railroad company. The original first  trains stopped at the bottom of a hill east. a coal mining town called Xenia. Some engines couldn't move on going up the hill after taking on water without having a lot of struggle.  So they discovered that if they kept up their momentum through the proposed stop and sped on up the hill they could make the incline. They then decided that they  should have the station at the top of the hill.

The area was all virgin prairie with roaming buffalo. There were Native American Indians that lived closer to the river a few miles away from the town. I assume they migrated south in the winter following the Des Moines river.  I bet they had buffalo and deer all in the areas that they lived.  The farmers did break up the prairie soil at that time of late 1800s. Some of the area farmers today can follow their family roots back to the beginning of the development towns and counties. The train was beneficial to build up the area and the town as it brought in goods and more people to live in the town.

When I left this morning for school I could see about a dozen blooms on the vines.  It is nice not to have it stop raining for a while.  Yesterdays rain was strange as the rain did not cool it down at all.  One could take a walk in the rain and feel like it was a rainy sauna.