Greetings! Welcome to #WeekendCoffeeShare, thank you for meeting me on this Saturday. Please come in for a nice cool beverage, unless you prefer something hot.

First of all, we finally got rain this week!

I live in the 2nd driest state in the US. Rain is incredibly rare during the summer months. The last time I got any rain was probably in early June when it rained for an entire 15 minutes. I was over the moon and so was the garden. This week, it rained for almost 90 minutes! Somebody get Noah and his Ark ready, she said sarcastically.

Right before it rain though, the wind came and whipped everything sideways. It did some damage to the garden, particularly the front garden, where most of my giant sunflowers reside. These pictures of the sunflowers were taken before the storm.

The wind not only broke off a couple of the branches on one of my sunflower (the one on the left), which is now almost 6-feet tall, it also partially uprooted another one of my sunflowers (the one on the right), which main branch is about as thick as a tree trunk. It’s now fighting for its life but I have good hopes that it will make it. All it needs is some sun, water, and good food, which I gave (water and the food) last night and it’s looking slightly better but it will take time to recover.

After a week of partially cooler weather, we are once again entering a heat wave. This time appears to be for the next 10 days. I took all the shade clothes down prior to the wind storm and had to put it back up again on Thursday when the temperature on Friday (yesterday) was forecasted at 97-degrees-Fahrenheit. It’ll be extra toasty this weekend, I can assure you.

Here are some of the great things from this week. I finally have cucumbers and watermelon!

I swear these guys are growing bigger and longer by the minute. I’ll have to secure it with a net in a few days since I’m growing up a trellis this year to alleviate pest pressure. I’m still having a pest infestation in my garden due to strange wet weather this year – earwigs, cabbage loopers, rolly polly, you name it. Oh, and let me say thank goodness I haven’t encountered the dreaded tomato hornworm. Let’s not jinx it.

Anyway, the internet says it takes about 30 days for watermelons to from formation to ready for harvest. So I’m looking at probably middle to the end of August, which, hey, it’s still summer.

I’ve been growing these Japanese cucumbers since May and it’s just now coming to fruition. I hope it’s worth the wait when I get to harvest this fella in probably a few days.

I think this last one is more for me than anyone else. My street is finally getting re-paved after the city promised us they’d repave it years ago. The construction crew came and took out the top few inches of the asphalt on Monday. Right now, it’s a dirt road past my driveway and you cannot imagine how much dust was flying around during the wind storm the other night. It was like tiny hurricanes all over the place. I wish I had gotten a picture of that but I didn’t want to eat dust.

I really hope the road will get repaved next week. I don’t feel good having to drive down a series of dirt road every time I need to get out of the neighborhood. The last time I drove down a dirt road was during my nightscape photography class last April and ended up with a screw puncturing one of my tires. I do not want to repeat that experience.

#weekendcoffeeshare is hosted by Natalie of Natalie the Explorer. I appreciate you stopping by. Until next we chat. 🙂