This was last night's dinner: a quick stir fry with snow peas from my garden, broccoli florets, mushrooms and cashews over jasmine rice. I'm so happy a few others are doing the Photo Challenge! Makes it more fun!

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We are finally getting some much needed rain today. Not driving rain, just a nice light to medium rain.

We're expecting a possible first frost Thursday night, which may signal the end of my herbicide treatment of tree of heaven seedlings. I'm just anxious to do as much as I can since I will have to wait an entire year to treat again. There are literally hundreds of these things popping up in back and they grow fast. The trumpet vine can continue to be treated until a HARD frost (defined as 24 degrees or colder), and temps are still well above 50 degrees. The trumpet vine is inaccessible until late September or so, so for the same reason, I want to get to as much as possible as it's killed some nice evergreens here already. It's relentless.

Yesterday was warm and humid so I didn't do any of this work then, but tomorrow will be considerably cooler and is ideal for this kind of work.

Opsie. Skipped another day. I'm just busy.

View from my doorway...

This is what I did today. Been pulling it for weeks. Rather exhausting as it also includes carrying the stuff on a pitchfork about 300 feet from where it's growing. Next stop: dump.

This week I reviewed Kiva loans from Phillippines and Kenya, many for people wanted about $175 for a sanitary toilet. Many of the borrower photos show the borrower standing in a thatched hut or sometimes an outhouse built of cinder blocks. It will have the toilet itself but there is no plumbing. I have often wondered how they make do and I guess they must dig a pit in the ground under the toilet (?) and use a bucket of water to wash it all down. In any event, it's a good example of how a relatively small amount of money can be life-changing for someone living where the average annual income is about $4,000.

I visited a native plant garden nursery in my area with a friend who is as passionate about native plants as I am. She's chair of my town's conservation commission, and also serves on the same board as I do that promotes awareness of Japanese knotweed and how damaging to the environment it is.

I enjoyed walking around and talking plants with her. I bought a Pearly everlasting. (I always enjoy the names of these plants.) The next day, I dug up 2 smallish beds here that contained lily of the valley (spreading into my lawn after enjoying itself since before I moved here) and a daisy that was pretty for a brief week or two but rarely attracted pollinators. I'd like to get 2 more pearly everlasting to fill in that bed.

The other bed, nearby, is shaded for most of the day by large rhododendrons, so while I haven't yet settled on what to plant there, I'm thinking maybe great blue lobelia, maybe with some geranium maculatum. I have a small patch of the lobelia and it's doing great, but probably gets too much sun in its current location.

Here's a picture I took last night of a bumblebee bedded down for the night inside a lobelia flower. It closely resembles how I would feel after a long day at work. It is said that male bumblebees, which do not return to the nest after leaving, often bunk down at night in the flowers they are foraging on, both for protection from predators and also for warmth.

We're in the middle of some very nice weather here in New England so I've been spending more time catching up on yard work. Which means other things get ignored, like house cleaning.

Mid-week I suggested to our litter board's exec director that we reschedule the litter cleanup set for Saturday to Sunday instead, on account of expected rain. She agreed.  I don't take doing that lightly because it takes quite a lot of work to reschedule anything and let people know, and since I do all the social media promotions and the PR, this has fallen on me to do.

I had to create and post new Facebook and Instagram flyers, call the first selectman's office, call the state representative's office (both are still coming), revise the date on earthday.org, contact the local paper (which luckily is online so they can publish quickly), cancel the Facebook "event" and make a new one with the correct date, revised the greeting on my landline, which I'm using so people can call the number and listen to the pre-recording as to whether we're still on or not...and on and on.

Anyway, I think we're ready for the Sunday event.

Today was a very productive day, yardwork-wise. After I got back from the gym, I had lunch, relaxed a bit, then headed outside to see if I could clear some of the wineberry and multiflora rose and bittersweet that climbs into 4 beautiful, mature evergreens I have out back. If I don't stay on top of it, you can see how the trees slowly begin getting bald spots; eventually, they will die.

This shows the edge of the lawn in the back and the "brushy" area behind it. To the left, you see a red maple beginning to leaf out, and to its right are the 4 evergreens. Two of them are very large (larger than they look here because I took this photo from a 2nd floor window) and in great shape; one is smaller, probably becus deer browsed on the bark, damaging it, but it's still hanging in there; I think I'll put some  plastic fencing around the trunk. The 4th one, which you can't see, has lawn all its needles except for the top part; not sure what's happening there.

So I worked on that for about 2 hours, to the point of exhaustion. I was afraid I may not get another chance to do this this year, because once all the foliage is completely leafed out, it just gets too overgrown out there to take a risk with ticks. (As it was, the other day I caught 3 climbing on me after working near the road front doing something different...so they are definitely out.) I dress all in white so as to see them easier. Plus the poison ivy grows a good 10 inches high before it flops over on the ground and I have to avoid that, too.

I'm feeling really good about what I accomplished. Did I clear it all out? No, no way. But I did a lot more than I thought I would.  A lot of the bittersweet I could pull out by hand (with gloves), and I was also pulling lots of small burning bush and Japanese maple seedlings. I also see I have a problem with the doublefile viburnum, which tends to be invasive.

Little by little, I'm making progress. The most important thing is to attend to doing this sort of thing REGULARLY or your work will be reversed.

Earlier in the week I dug out the final (I hope) patch of lesser celandine I hadn't noticed before. That, too, was a job. I didn't want to compost it, even at the town transfer station, so I spread it out on a tarp on my sunny driveway to bake and dry out for a few days. Since it will rain tomorrow, I threw the now dead plants into a trash bag and will take to the dump.

I took a self-paced, online safe driving test with AAA last week. It costs $20, but will entitle me to 3 years' worth of discounts on my car insurance. I forget how much of a discount it is. The test was QUITE long with a lot of different modules, so it took all told probably 4 hours or so.

My knotweed group met with the chair of a river watershed group here in town and we agreed we'd work together to begin treating the knotweed that is growing IN the river. Very bad. Trout Unlimited will join in, too. The first thing we'll do is tape the knotweed stands up and down the river. We can't treat it til late summer/early fall, so as to minimize any impact on bees; honeybees LOVE knotweed. I was actually considering buying a pair of waders so i walk through dense brush with the others to access the river, but I may not do that. Ticks, again, is my concern. We'll invite the press to come, but I would also like to be there taking pictures so I can post on our group's Facebook page. So I don't know.

Oh! I received another donation to my fundraiser today. I think it was someone from this group, but I'm not positive becus the name isn't the name that's used here. If it was you, Ceejay, THANK YOU SO MUCH.