We’re going into late summer and yet, amazingly, given the hot temps and continued drought our area is experiencing, flowers are still blooming, visitors are still visiting.
This is MewMew, or Mr. MewMew to you and us. He was a neighborhood dump or possibly left behind when his family moved away. Our neighborhood had a lot of families pack up and leave over the past year and a half. MewMew hung around our outdoor feeders for nearly a year before a great family just a few doors down decided he was exactly the cat they needed. And now, he has an official home. And yet, he still takes second breakfast here every morning. He’s mostly friendly but when he’s ready to move on, he’s gone in a flash of his floofy, floofy tail.
Another neighbor cat, P, visits almost every day. She likes drinking out of the small depressions and holes in the rocks next to our big fountain because she’s a petite slurper that way. We haven’t seen her orange brother W in months and though we know he likes hanging out around the houses way down the hill that are closer to the greenspace fields with all those mousies, voles, and rabbits, we sure do wish he’d come visit so we’d know he’s okay.
Mom’s Cyclamen is hanging in there through all the heat. It flowered heavily earlier this year after being planted directly in the ground last year and Mom’s now let it go to seed. She knows that might spell the end of the little plant Dad gave her back in 2018, a few months before he was laid off, but she’s okay with allowing it to do whatever it wants. She’s still amazed that this greenhouse plant, grown mainly to look pretty indoors for only one year, is alive at all. And putting those cracked hazelnut shells around the base really does keep the slugs away!
We decided to grow just cherry tomatoes this year. Last year, even with all the heat, drought, and smoke, our bigger tomatoes did poorly. We got three. Well, technically, two and a half. It wasn’t a tomato year and one never really knows which year will be a winner for tomato growing around here.
Well, apparently, this was the year for growing big tomatoes, according to everyone Mom’s talked to in and around our area. And here we are with only dinky little tomatoes.
We don’t purposely grow sunflowers. Oh, we like them okay, we just don’t grow them intentionally. The birds do that for us by bringing, sometimes pooping, seeds for all kinds of things that, sometimes, Mom likes or dislikes, allows to grow or rips them out of the ground immediately. Like horribly invasive blackberries.
We let the sunflowers, a whole bunch of them this year, grow because we hoped they would help feed the birds. Then our latest heatwave got to them. This photo was taken in early August. Nope, they aren’t happy-looking flowers now but we’re hoping the birds will get seed from them anyway.
Here’s another bird-poop plant, as Mom calls them. She’s always excited to see what those birds might bring and was wildly excited when she discovered this Marsh Marigold under one of our blueberry bushes. She loved the thought of growing a Marsh Marigold! Then, she read that Marsh Marigolds are very invasive and are considered poisonous to small animals. Despite cutting back the pom-pom seed clusters so she could enjoy seeing just the flowers and leaves, she knew its days in our garden were numbered. And they were just that.
Probably due to the hotter-than-usual weather, our crepe myrtle bushes are blooming a month earlier than they should be. And we were resigned to the likelihood that the heat would burn up all the flowers and buds, like happened last year.
But they’re hanging in there okay so far. Mom’s keeping them a bit more moist than she felt she could afford to do last year and that seems to be making a difference. Couldn’t save the front yard grass from burning, but that will come back in a few months.
We found a tennis ball in our backyard a couple of weeks ago, probably a lost toy from our neighbors who, briefly, had a puppy (and got rid of it just as soon as it grew into a gangly, barking teenage dog that no one over there wanted to play with – GRRR! BAD, BAD people!!)
Our visiting raccoons seem to like it and we find it in different locations every week. Wouldn’t it be fun to get a photo of those babies rolling it around?
It’s been hot here this summer. Low humidity, higher than normal heatwave after heatwave, and orange, smoky skies. Still, that’s not really a reason to do normal things wrong, is it? Isn’t laying crossways on one’s favorite box, thereby crushing the sides, instead of laying inside the favorite box, wrong? Shouldn’t it be deemed wrong?
What is this? An artistic endeavor? A cat rebellion? Some kind of political statement? Yes, we know this is far from being a fresh box; it’s about a year old maybe, but we thought Tessa liked it that way. We’ve heard of thinking outside of the box, but laying outside of the box? That’s a new one! Tessa, you’re ruining it and this may be why you can’t have nice things.
Okay, and what is this now? Oh, Tessa can’t be the only one? Olivia, you have to be part of the anti-normal movement, too? Here’s the deal: Cats USUALLY sit on the chair and lean AGAINST the pillow. Not sit up on the top of the pillow. What is with it with you two today?
