The Farm In Summertime

I returned home from the Hopkinton Summer Festival and my neighbor's miniature horses. I let the dogs out into their fenced yard and began a walk around the place to see what was new since my last visit. The first thing I noticed was the old fashioned Day Lilies in bloom. This patch, I believe, is an older version even than the usual single orange flowers one sees commonly along the roads. It is slightly double, blooms later and less profusely and has oddly folded leaves. My mother used to have a single plant like this and someone told her it was a throwback to the original, wild progenitor of all modern Day Lilies:

And just then the neighbor's horse drawn wagon passed by again (see yesterday's post for a great photo of the horses), this time with a couple of horseback riders along:

I checked out the plants growing in my old concrete silo base which I thought looked like Elderberries. They were beginning to look even more like Elderberries but the birds were eating the berries as fast as they could form, leaving almost none to ripen. That would explain why I've never seen berries there:

There had been a major windstorm two weeks earlier and it had knocked down a lot of limbs along the road. My neighbor had been piling them up:


A large section of my pear tree had been ripped off by the violent winds:

And yet the remaining parts of the tree were still on track to produce a nice crop of pears:

There were going to be a lot of apples also:

The dogs were happy and getting along well with the tenants' two young Labs:

My Phlox were in bloom:

And the tenants' vegetables were growing nicely:

Alas, the roof of a nearby trailer had been ripped off by the recent windstorm. Luckily, no one has lived there in years. Another trailer, just down the road, had much more damage. In fact, it had been demolished:

My barn roof had been finished since the last visit, with a new ridge cap and completely nailed down and coated. I'm happy to say that it made it unscathed through the big windstorm: