Garden and Nature

I have not been feeling my garden this year.  I planted, and pulled a few weeds, but it wasn't bringing me nearly the joy it did last year, so my plants are being choked out by weeds.  I even paid Emily and Grace to weed the garden that you can see from the road while we were gone, because it just looked so awful, and Grace and I had already cleared it once this summer!  We do have a pumpkin vine, but no pumpkins, or even female flowers, so probably no pumpkins this year. = (

That said, the girls did go out and collect tomatoes from one of the struggling plants, and they were so tasty! Our first heartvest of tomatoes this year.

A beautiful 'grocery store parking lot sunset' picture.

Our dead apple trees finally fell down, so we hired our lawn guy to take them out as well as the storm damaged tree. It was still alive, but he said it was going to damage the fence further if it fell any more.  So, it's gone now too, and our backyard looks so empty!  I think we might need to buy some baby trees and see if we can get some new ones growing!

The carrot plants went to seed last year, and seem to be growing really well!  I didn't cull them at all though, so they are small little things.

One of our landscaped plants, that we inherited with the house, makes these beautiful blooms every year, and every year I forget and find them beautiful!

I didn't include all of my nature pictures here this time, so there are still some mixed into our travel posts.

It's been a warm summer, which has been lovely for me, but I don't think that all of our plants have enjoyed it quite as much as I have!  Heading into a new season soon, which is sad, but I am looking forward to all the new colors!

later days

Grace and Juliet spend a week at Woldumar

Summer Camps this year all fell early in the summer.  The only camps that Alice had any interest in did not offer camps for high schoolers. = (   Emily has color guard camp all summer long, except the week of July 4th.  William's camp started the week after they ended school, which meant he was already in camp during Alice's last week of school!  Grace and Juliet wanted to go back to Woldumar, and did not regret it!  

I dug out the waterproof digital camera* and Grace carried it with her for the week snapping pictures of their camp adventures.  Each day I took one picture and will include them mixed in, in chronological order below.

So, now I'm turning the keyboard over to Grace so that she can type up her adventures day by day!

Day 1:

I took a picture of these stones because we were building a fairy house! it was destroyed before I could take a picture, but we rebuilt the dairy house the next day.

This is a cool picture of some stairs I found in the woods. I asked Juliet to stop and pose on it so she could be in the picture. the stairs were kind of covered by leaves and vines, but they were still seeable, and you could easily step on them. I also just thought they looked cool.    

thus is a picture of a leaf/branch pile, and it was really big, and it was something that would catch a lot of people's eye.

this was a fallen tree that looked really cool in the sunlight, sadly most of these pictures were better in real life than they were on camera because of the light.

my friend Maya took this picture of Juliet and I the sun helped here

we called this tree the octopus tree and Maya also took this picture.

we came across this bridge and Juliet posed on it

this was such a beautiful picture from this flower.

we tried taking a picture of some ducks but our group was walking off so we panicked and took a picture of this tiny island instead.

there was something growing on this log and I thought it looked cool.

a cute little space.

angles of trees.

if you look at it closely you can see a heart in the sunlight spot.

i found some moss against a tree but i hurt my ankle when i was going up to it.

we were playing thicket i think it was called and me and Maya took this picture of me observing it

this was a really cool hole we found in the ground.

Day 2:

 our fairy house was destroyed(again)

we rebuilt it but it did not have any more magic in the air we were all disappointed. our OG plan was to build a fair house like each day, because our first one only took like 2 hours. the fun part was that the (concrete) was mud the patio was moss and the beds and furniture were leaves. we used flowers we found as well as some wood.

GROUP PHOTO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

this was a REALLY  steep hill that was fun to climb up.

a sand hill that we also went up. i only got sand in my shoes when Juliet put them in my shoes for no reason

this was at the top of the sand hill, along with a fence i didn't take a picture of.

there was a little spot at the bottom of these steps that you can't see and I took a picture of Juliet, Maya, and Josephine

Josephine was on this log and it was really cool cuz it was above the lake and really risky.

this was an area of the lake filled with green

we were racing and Juliet and i tied: 6s

we played at this tree, and we found a big slug on it it was so cute I pushed it is to a crack so no one would step on it.

we went canoeing and maya took a picture of me

this was a really pretty like path that Maya took a picture of she actually took all the pictures!

we saw this REALLY pretty lily

GROUP PHOTO!!!!!!!!

we came back and this is what our fairy house 2.0 looked like

Day 3: 

GROUP PHOTO!!!!!!!!!!

this is like a really cool log covered in yellow mushrooms and i thought it looked cool.

we built a fort in the woods, and this is how it turned out, we had limited time though

day 4:

we saw this rock tree thing and i looked really cool to me

we went to the lake and spent some time there exploring.

Julliet asked me to take a picture of her here on the tall mountain.

we found another bridge and someone spotted a snake with a fish in it's mouth! I tried taking a video but didn't get the snake in.

we found this bench it said, " two sisters watching" and since me and Juliet were both there, we had Maya take a picture. we were not sitting on it though cuz it was wet

GROUP PHOTO!!!!!!!!!!

Day 5:

On Day 5, Grace was too busy having fun to take pictures, so only my 'before camp' picture is here to document these two on their final day of fun!  Both of them loved camp so much they asked if they could join their friends for another week later in the summer, but when I looked at the registration page, that week is 'waitlisted.'  = (  Since Emily never got bumped from the waitlist, I'm thinking that it would be unlikely that both of them would be able to move up, and it would be so unfair for only one of them to get to go.  

I think that they will keep fond memories of camp for years to come!

later days

*when I bought this camera for our great wolf lodge trip (that was postponed thanks to covid) it was around $40, and I struggled to splurge on it.  We've now used it enough that I'm glad that I bought it, and it's now been long enough that digital cameras are back en vogue!!! ; )