Officially Summer

This weekend was Father’s Day! We celebrated Mike by making his favorite foods that I’m usually too lazy to make, thoroughly cleaned and organized his office space for him, and played board games. For breakfast he had poached eggs, lunch was potato skins and dinner was breaded chicken with corn on the cob and twice baked potatoes. Special days here I guess mean a lot of potatoes.

We’re finally having some change in the garden. We have blooms on our spaghetti squash and tiny baby green beans. Somehow we also have what I think are sunflowers coming up, although we didn’t plant sunflowers. I’m assuming that the kids or a bird must have dropped some birdseed that had sunflower seeds in it. We also have a ton of weeds. I was planning on using grass clippings as mulch to prevent some of them, but we ended up having to spray poison ivy, and I didn’t want to have the chemicals from the poison ivy spray end up in the garden. I’m not sure if that even possible, but I didn’t want to risk it.

Ugh, poison ivy. Last year Mike cleared an overgrown area of our backyard and wasn’t very careful because he hadn’t ever gotten a poison ivy rash, so he thought he wasn’t allergic. Well, maybe he never actually touched it before because he ended up getting it so bad he had to go to the ER. He had it covering most of his body and had hives everywhere also. It was horrible. So needless to say, I’ve been extra cautious of it this year, and I keep finding it popping up in random places. Luckily though, there doesn’t seem to be any back in the area he cleared. He must have gotten all the roots, which is good at least. It would have been horrible for him to go through all that and then for it to be covered in poison ivy again. I even found some in a grassy area which surprised me. I thought I had read once that it couldn’t grow in grass. I guess that isn’t always true!

Yesterday we got a special backyard visit from Colleen! She also brought me some supplies to make some more poison ivy spray. (I found a recipe for a homemade spray made with vinegar, salt and dawn dish soap. So it’s less toxic and less expensive then what we’ve been using but hopefully will still work.) Our lovely time got cut short when we got word a bear was roaming the neighborhood. We don’t live in an area where I ever would have thought we would need to go inside because of a bear. We have seen deer, fox, and rabbits in our backyard, but that is usually the extent of wildlife. Of course, when I told Animal Lover that we were going in because the neighbors said there was a bear, she said: “Then why are we going in??”. She sat for a good portion of the afternoon looking out the window, hoping the bear would find its way to our backyard. To her dismay and my relief, it never made it to our yard.

I hope everyone had an enjoyable father’s day weekend and has a great week!