Lots of pictures today. This is my second season clearing the excess greenery from the bridge on Midwest Boulevard. My first shot is before I started. Keep in mind that this bridge is part of the section of road closed because of the bridge just south of here over Crutcho Creek is blocked for as yet unknown reasons.
It wasn’t that hard because I had already cut it harshly last year. This year it was just a bunch of respawned limbs and so forth. While I was doing this, some guy was parked on the bridge, normally illegal, but there are no patrols on closed roads. He was fishing just a few yards away over the same side of the bridge, also illegal. We chatted for awhile, then he got tired of no reaction from the fish and left.
Back south of me, on the other side of that closed bridge, this tree had fallen into the road. Guess what? I’m not trimming that back, at least not until I take care of higher priorities. If OKC can’t be bothered to take care of it, I’ll get it later in the month. Right now, I’m working on another neglected bridge.
The Britton Road bridge over that same Canadian River has been neglected for many years. I decided to start working on it. What you see here is part 1 of the intruding foliage. There’s a lot of it because there’s so much land beneath the bridge in the flood plain, and stuff just loves to grow up against the structure.
This is what it looks like after I cut it back. There was also a part 2, but the images get too repetitive. The point was how much there was. I got two parts done and there was a third I didn’t touch because I ran out of drinking water. I stopped when there was one bottle left, and it was empty before I got home. This bridge is about ten miles from my apartment. I’ll come back and do more next week.
Out at Draper Lake, the blackberries are ripening. They should have a decent long season, at least two weeks. These bushes are in the fence along the northwest entrance path into the lake’s recreational area. Wild blackberries have a distinct taste, quite unlike the bland commercial stuff you can buy the grocery stores. They are also dangerous to pick from, not only because of the heavy thorns, but they host deer ticks.
Dewberries are a relative of blackberries, but closer to raspberries. The vines aren’t so thick, and tend to droop and run across the ground. These bushes are clustered in with some other greenery, and without the berries are quite hard to pick out in the image. You can see this is the end of their season. They overlap the blackberries, but come a few weeks earlier and tend to fade quickly out in the sun. The berries are also smaller in this setting. They grow a lot better, and bear fruit a lot longer, where there is more water and some shade during part of the day.
The surprise for me this year was the sand plums. They are prolific on shrubs that in previous years hadn’t shown any fruit at all. They are edible but extremely tart until they are almost ready to fall on the ground. These are very close to picking, but doing so is risky for humans. Those limbs are covered in very long spikes. Back when I tried to harvest these, I used an extended grabber stick and still got scratched up. Still, it’s nice to see them back again after such a long absence.
Finally, these miniature daisies were covering the ground for a mile or so along the bottom of the dam. There are other flowers blooming right now, but these are so dominant because they can come back after mowing.
