Summer report...

Summer has sped by so far, and I have slipped back into my habit of posting Wordless Wednesdays and not much else. So I thought an update was in order.

First off, we got new siding on our house this summer. It was way overdue. You can see what the old siding looked like on the garage to the back and right of the house. We will eventually update the garage siding, but that will probably be a couple of years down the road. We also replaced all of our windows and the front and back doors since last summer. The pic above is before painting. We get tons of compliments on the "new color" of our house, but that is really just the primer color that came on the siding. We will be painting the house sometime before the end of summer, weather permitting. The new color is a blue called Mood Indigo, and it will have light blue, almost white trim and burgundy accents.

I haven't done a garden post all summer. We planted a little earlier than last year, but still not as early as we would have liked to. We got ten raspberry plants, which won't produce much this year, but hopefully will next year. We also have another section of garden with pumpkins growing there and we have blueberry bushes as well. We had zucchini, but slugs got to all three plants, and I haven't planted more. It has been nice to eat salads made with our own romaine, carrots and radishes, and hopefully the spinach and kale will be ready soon to add to that. So far the garden is doing well.

We enjoy the local wildlife here year round. Above some young birds are enjoying the sun. You can see a parent bird feeding one of them on the right.

We saw some nutria on a hike recently as well. They are a large otter like rodent. It was fun to see them frolicking around in the water.

Can you find the aphid in the pic above? I think it looks like a tiny shrimp. We have a lot of berries that are fairly accessible to where we live. The salmon berries above are just outside our back gate, along with some thimbleberries. We also have blackberries both in our yard and just outside of it. We are hoping that next year we will have a good crop of raspberries and blueberries to go along with all the berries that grow wild here.

Other than enjoying where we live and the mild climate here (I think we got to 70 once or twice this summer, but mostly we have been in the mid 60s) we have had a few lovely visits with family, and have more scheduled before the summer is out. With just a bit over a month of summer left we have a lot to keep us busy. How has your summer been so far?