the tomatoes were ripening; in another week there will be quite a few. perhaps later in august it will be time to open the self-serve roadside stand. and plan lettuce and spinach for a fall crop.
there is a good-sized snapping turtle hanging out in the pond. my little camera can't do much to show it, but i am trying to learn to enlarge and crop. almost every morning there is a great blue heron on the pond and between the turtle and the heron the goldfish population is slightly reduced, as far as i can tell. but not enough to worry about.
jm and i have been riding our bikes around the neighborhood late in the afternoon and now that i am doing the natural area assessments, i look at fields in a different way.
this is a large field planted in soybeans on six mile down near earhart road. it's good to keep land in cultivation, otherwise the invasives move in. i will resist going on and on about canada thistle, autumn olive, reed canary grass, purple loosestrife, etc. my question is: when one invasive meets another, who will win out? i am keeping an eye on a swamp nearby where reed canary grass is competing with cattails (yes, some cattails are native, but there is an alien kind taking over).
we took ellie swimming in the mighty huron. there were some ducks around, and for fear that she might take off after them, we kept her on the leash for a while. this was at hudson mills metro park, one of the several attractive and interesting parks nearby.
penny invited me to go to the beach on lake michigan with her large, entertaining family. they'd rented a very large house for a week, so there was room for all. she assured me that if i came, i wouldn't have to be "nice, enthusiastic, or cooperative." that's an excellent sort of invitation. and who wouldn't have fun with penny?
and, for some intellectual content, there was jerry on the beach, reading "After Capitalism." i never found out what the book was proposing. i didn't ask. but i do wonder, slightly.
we spent a lot of time on the beach at south haven. the first couple of days there was a stiff wind out of the west, creating some waves to play in. this clan likes to go out and do things. i admire that. penny, meghan and i went kayaking (no photos, worried about the camera getting wet); the others went out in a speedboat for tubing and accompanied by a dinghy; there were lots of bikes and horseback riding and paintball were being proposed. i was interested in both of these, but when i heard that being shot with a paintball actually hurts, i could forego that.
here's corbie, riding shotgun in the speedboat on the day before his 11th birthday. katie was at the wheel. the "teenagers" would be tubing, but they were hardly teenagers at all, having at least graduated from high school.
we took this photo so that their parents would have something to see of their last happy hours, in case they all drowned in lake michigan.
corbett and patrick took off in the dinghy, following the speedboat, headed for open water. penny and i were stationed on the beach, ready to rescue anyone who needed rescuing, or who wanted to get out of hours of sun in the speedboat, as corbie did. two ladies in hats got to the dinghy before penny and i did, and they helped corbie get out. they had brought two little boys to the beach for the day. corbett was happy to give the boys a ride in the dinghy, perhaps more fun than their inflatable raft. the lake was calm that day.
and finally, on a different note,
this church, or ex-church, was a block from the rental house. alas, it is in very poor condition, which seems a shame as it has many interesting architectural details: the tower over the entrance, the little colonnade on the tower, the pattern of shingles on the roof, the round window with a flat bottom, some simple rectangular stained glass windows. i wonder what style this is? any ideas, you architecture mavens who read the blog? (i know, ms is out of the country now, but she'll be back).
as you can see, my summer vacation has been very interesting, as penny would say, and a whole lot of fun. penny told me when i left that i had been too nice, but it wasn't hard at all.
