I finally got a taste of dewberries this season. These are in the fence along the promenade trail on the NW corner of Draper Lake. As you can see, they have just begun to turn ripe (black). Meanwhile, the blackberries are in bloom, so they’ll be ready in about three weeks. On rides up around the north end of the county, I’ve seen just a few blackberries starting to ripen in protected areas (getting sun, but not so much wind).
Of course, we have to have some summer flower shots! The stuff in the foreground is clusters of tiny daisy-looking blossoms, actual daisies in the mid-ground bracketed by two different purple colored things. The red and pink flowers come out later when it gets hotter.
This (below) is just another mix, including some yellow sunflowers and a lot of plants that don’t flower. Okies call them “weeds” but they always show up in the flowers like this. They aren’t noxious in any way, but they do host ticks and chiggers, so you don’t want to stand still in them very long.
This (below) is another batch of sunflowers and some other stuff for which I don’t have any names. It features the same leafy stalks as before.
There is a stock pond on the OKC-PD property (below left). The OKC Police Department has a domestic animal facility which we jokingly call “the dog and pony barn”. There’s a training area for working dogs, a barn with stalls for police horses, some miscellaneous horse trailers and other farming type equipment, but there’s also some cattle, and from time to time, other domestic livestock shows up. In the background of this image on the right is a collection of waterfowl that nobody owns, they just hang around because the police feed them.
This is just one of the numerous sand and gravel extraction pits along the course of the river in the OKC area. This one has been worked over so that the banks are sloped. Off camera to the right, this pond connects directly to the river. Thus, it keeps the same water level.
