My Favorite Photos - June 2021

For this swap on Swap-bot, I'm sharing my favorite photos from June 2021. A short description is before each photo.

The poppies were blooming. I added two new poppies to the garden by the back door. They were so bright and cheerful.

The irises bloomed early this year (as did a lot of different flowers). These irises were left by the previous owner and we've had them now for over 25 years.

These are Nora Barlow columbines. There are tons of little pink flowers at the top of the plants. There are seed pods that form later in the season and they rattle.

I was taking pictures of the plants in the garden and saw the raindrops on the leaves of the orange lilies. As I looked closer at the photo, I thought it looked like the initial of my first name: A.

We saw the return of butterflies. They liked the flowers on the Dame's Rocket. Dame's Rocket is actually an invasive plant. However, it is one of the earliest blooming flowers so we keep it in the garden.

This is another type of columbine in our north garden. The plant is covered with flowers this year.

Olivia was hired by two people to create gardens in their yards. This was the first job that she did in South Minneapolis. 

Gammelgarden Museum (about 5 minutes from our home) had a special community art display/fundraiser. People could paint or embellish wooden Dala horses with any design they wanted. This is one I liked.

This one I thought was clever too. The Dala horse is a Swedish symbol. However, the person who did this Dala horse made it an Egyptian horse.

This is the fence with all the different Dala horses.

Olivia finished a barn quilt that she was commissioned to create. This is her 19th barn quilt she has made.

This is what the barn quilt looks like up on the barn.

She also made another barn quilt. This is her 20th one. It is the most complex one she has made.

This is what it looks like up on the barn/garage.

Here's a view from the street.

We went on a walk at Father Hennepin State Park which is on the shores of Lake Mille Lacs in central Minnesota. Even though the day was in the upper 80s, it felt about 10 degrees cooler in the woods.

 

This is Lake Mille Lacs. When I was a baby, I lived in a cabin at a camp where my dad was the camp director. 

There's a fire tower at Mille Lacs Kathio State Park (another state park that's right by Father Hennepin State Park). It's about 100 feet tall. At the top, there was a nice breeze and an incredible view. 

Paige, Sophia, and Olivia are at the top with Lake Mille Lacs in the background.

Olivia and I visited the Japanese garden at Normandale Community College. It's a beautiful garden and it is much larger than I anticipated.

There were stone lanterns around the garden.

Olivia enjoyed watching a mother duck and her little duckling near an island in the Japanese garden.

On the other side of the Japanese garden there's a wetland. An egret was standing among the lillypads. 

On the morning of Olivia's ACT, we spotted a young male deer in our pasture. He jumped the fence and went over to the neighbor's farm. He took a break from eating the newly-growing corn to look up at us.

The wren family did well during June. The mother and father wren made countless trips to the gardens and yard to find caterpillars for their babies. 

We also had a family of tree swallows using one of the birdhouses by Olivia's garden. In the other birdhouse, there was a family of black-capped chickadees. 

Cooper was watching me from the backyard as I weeded Olivia's garden.

I noticed a spiderweb that was between the woven wire fence.

Aspen waited patiently for me while I was weeding one morning.

Scooby waited on the deck with Aspen. 

I went to a peony garden open house. The gentleman had over 200 varieties of peonies growing in his gardens. He also had an indoor display with some of the peonies. He labeled each one so people knew what kind they were looking at in the vases. I loved seeing this display of peonies.

My sister, her son (Jordan), and Olivia made a trip to Winona to visit family friends, Larry and Maureen. We had such a nice drive there and a great visit with them. They made a delicious dinner which reminded me of all the times our family went down to visit them when we were growing up.

Olivia and I nominated one of our friends and neighbors, Dan, for the "Good Neighbor Award." Dan helped with the installation of 18 barn quilts, rototilled a public garden for one of Olivia's planting projects, played Santa for years for the Lions for the community breakfast in December, and so much more. This is a well-deserved award. What's challenging for us is that Dan is on hospice now, so we know our time with him is limited.

Olivia and I went back to the Japanese garden since she wanted to feed the koi fish there. They were eager to accept any fish food tossed their way.

I like the bright red bridges at the Japanese garden.

We noticed that a wren was going in and out of the roosting box by the driveway. We took the lid off and were pleasantly surprised to see 6 eggs! The mother wren picked a nice, roomy home for herself and her future babies.

In late-June, I received the Melvin Jones Fellow award from the Lions Club I'm in. They recognized me for the volunteer work I did from July 2020 to June 2021 which basically kept the club going during a pandemic. I came up with a lot of new service events to keep the Lions in the forefront of people's minds, and to keep our members and community supporting the global causes that are important to us: Diabetes, environment, hunger, pediatric cancer, and vision. 

We went to Loring Park in Minneapolis and enjoyed the gardens. This is a round-headed leek that the bumblebees loved visiting.

Olivia fed the ducks some cracked corn.

There were super cute ducklings who also wanted some food.

Even the Canada geese wanted to have some corn. We found out that after we fed them that you're not supposed to do that. Whoops. Well...at least we had a fun time feeding them and we know next time not to do that.

We saw a rabbit at Loring Park. It sat and watched us for a while and then took off running. This is the first time I've been able to photograph a rabbit running.

Another plant at Loring Park was the Rattlesnake Master. This plant was a good 4 1/2 feet tall...a lot larger than I thought it would get. We have a couple of these plants in Olivia's garden. They aren't nearly that big now, but we now know how tall they will get.

Sophia is interning at a Swedish outdoor museum. On Midsommar Day, she made a daisy wreath for her head and got to wear a traditional outfit from Sweden. She enjoyed dressing up.

This is Sophia by one of the big Dala horses at the museum.

Since I have pictures of our other three dogs, I couldn't leave out a photo of our fourth dog, Danny. Danny was tired and resting on the couch after he got two shots the day before. He had a reaction to them and was in pain, so I had to get pain medicine for him. He recovered within two days and was back to normal.