Behold, Nature's Bounty! (of weeds)

The past few weeks have been extremely rainy here in H-town.  It's kinda weird, because so much of the country is going through such a severe drought, and instead of us being in the middle of it (which Texas normally is), we've had several major rains with flooding.  Craziness.

The good news from all this rain is, everything is green.  Some things, like our canna lillies, are blooming profusely.  They look so pretty and tropical, don't they!  These grew from the ground up after all the freezes we had this winter, and they're taller than I am now.

The bad news is (besides the monsterous mosquitoes), everything is green.  Including the weeds.  One might say that Gottfried has been sitting down on the job.  Or in the middle of the job, as the case may be. 

We might have a small weed problem.

I sincerely tried to get out and weed, but it kept raining every weekend, and the clay/soil we have just came out with the weeds when I tried to pull them.

I even tried to use weed cloth.  Last weekend, as I laid out the fabric on the grass to measure out the length for each row, a MASSIVE spider ran right across the fabric.  Ergo, I had to stop with only 1 row done. 

Seriously, the spider was huge.  The neighborhood was lucky that I didn't just set the garden on fire.  It was that big.  I get the heebie jeebies just thinking about it. 

Ugh.

*shiver*

Ok.  I'm ok now.

*shiver*

So.  The rest of the garden has been sacrified to the weeds.  Also, did I mention I stepped in a pile of fire ants?  Felt great. 

It's getting too hot for anything to really grow much more anyway, except for the okra and cotton that I did manage to put weed cloth around. 

Behold the pre-spider, pre-weed bounty!

Not the biggest producing garden, but hey.  1 okra is more than 0 okra. 

And yes, for those of you who are curious, the cotton is growing.  It had some pinkish/white blooms on it last weekend.  Then today, when I mustered up the courage to go check on them (seriously, the spider was ENORMOUS), the cotton looked like this:

I've never grown cotton.  So this is....cotton fruit?  If you eat it, do you get cotton mouth?  HA.  Apparently this is how the cotton bolls look before they crack open I guess.   I'm really interested to see what happens.  So far there are only 2 of these bolls/fruits, but hopefully more will grow.  Because I have no plans for it, but...anyway.

Other than monsterous weed meadows, my mom & 2 nieces came to visit a few weeks ago.  We had a great time - went to the funeral museum, the pool, and Old Town Spring.  Ate fried oreos and funnel cake.  Yum!

Alas, it's time for bed.  Hope everyone has a great July!