Happy Saturday!

I am now 2 days away from my road trip to Rocky Mountain National Park. It’s probably my usual pre-road-trip jitters but I am very nervous. I can feel my anxiety going through the roof at times. Even my watch can detect it as it would send me an alert saying high stress.

I am anxious because of the timed-entry thing. From the website I read, it looked like I must have a reservation for any of the viewpoints from 9 AM to 2 PM but from the videos I’ve watched, it looked like as long as I am within the park boundary before 9 AM, I can access the trails and the viewpoints. I don’t know which is true and I guess that’s what making me nervous. This is the first National Park I’ve been to that requires a timed-entry reservaton. I hope it will go well.

Meanwhile, in the garden, I harvested my first cucumber this week. It was a snacking cucumber and it was enough to make myself a cucumber salad for lunch. It was very tasty. I’m excited for this year’s cucumber harvest as I have a feeling it will be a bigger harvest than last year since I am planting most greenhouse varieties – the kind that only have female flowers and don’t need Mr. Bee to come and pollinate.

Compare to last year’s first cucumber harvest, I am about a month ahead in 2026. I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing yet.

While I was watering this week, I discovered this. You may say, “It’s a cherry, so what?”

I would say this is the only surviving cherry in my garden. Like probably much of the country, the weather has been freaky this year. Winter was extraordinarily warm and a warm March caused all the fruit trees to wake up and begin flowering. Then in April, a sudden frost killed every last one of the fruit in mere hours. Farmers were devastated when they woke up the next morning to find their peaches, plums, cherry, apples, etc. gone, dropped dead overnight.

I am not a farmer and I was devastated, too, even though I still have berries to fall back on.

So to find this single cherry hanging from a cherry tree in my garden felt like I was granted a miracle. I’m not a fan of cherries, so I let my mom had it and she said it was sweet.

I have been harvesting a small box of strawberries every other day for last few weeks. I am surprised by the amount of strawberries this year because I don’t think I’ve ever gotten so many.

Even though I know the strawberries are still pumping out fruit and it’s not time for the plants to have runners yet, I am letting it do its thing but I’ve only been allowing 1 to 2 runners per plant. If you don’t know what strawberry runners are, they are these long tails that come out of the plant that allow the plant to propagate.

I finally managed to find special pots last year that allow me to clip the pot to the side of the container to propagate the strawberries. I like to do it this way so I can control where the new plants go.

Anyway, I appreciate you stopping by and a special thanks to Natalie for hosting Weekend Coffee Share. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.