Summer is starting strong this year with temperatures in the mid 80s all week and more to come; the flowers love it! Here’s photos from both the front and back:
March flowers
Hurricane Ian
I first took notice of the then not-even-tropical-storm a week ago, when the future path from way east and south in the Atlantic was first predicted to head for Florida:
As we know Hurricane Ian eventually made landfall near Cape Coral and was EXTREMELY DESTRUCTIVE!
As it destroyed property on the Gulf Coast, we began to feel it’s effects here with wet and windy weather, on Wednesday … overnight into Thursday, about 1am we lost power …
Throughout Thursday Hurricane Ian slowly crossed Florida, delivering windy wet weather and preventing any power repairs … the winds were bad for a few of our plants but we escaped with no damage (although fencing was blown down next-door):
We spent Thursday night with candles and no power – and the power was still off this morning …
I took a walk downtown and along the trail this morning; I saw one of probably many power company repair trucks – and two downed trees along the trail (one completely blocking the trail so I had to turn back):
Power returned to our home mid-morning; we had to throw away some of the freezer contents but had no damage – very thankful that we didn’t experience worse (I can’t imagine what residents near Cape Coral / Fort Myers / Sanibel / etc will do now) …
A new Monarch Butterfly
Margaret has been focusing the back garden on native plants for a while now, including milkweed plants specifically to feed Monarch caterpillars. It’s worked rather too well, with the plants generally stripped to just sticks! But recently we had one create a chrysalis on the pool screen, and over the weekend it hatched. We didn’t see it emerge but there was an empty chrysalis, and a new Monarch Butterfly in the garden … Beautiful!
M&I / GBMINI 