It's a beautiful sunny day today, not so good for the fish, who really need a lot more rain in the pond, but it's great for solar power!  Yesterday I was feeding the fish when I noticed some small plants growing on the shallow side of the pond.  Some were rushes, lots of small ones, where the dry wash goes into the pond from the upper pasture.  Some others looked like arrowhead plants.  The funny thing is, this is a new farm pond.  There has never been a pond there before, to my knowledge, although there was a low spot there that was always kind of swampy in wet weather.  So this is a new pond, lots of bare dirt, no pond plants, and yet, there they are!  I am assuming that the seeds have been transported into the pond dirt by wind or water birds, and they have taken root.  I have spent a lot of money and work to plant pond plants in the pond, some are doing well, and others didn't make it, and here are very nice pond plants that just appeared all by themselves.  Go figure.  The one, the rushes, are called spike rushes.  My  Missouri pond book says this is a very good plant to have in the pond, as it makes a nice green carpet on the pond bottom and helps to prevent weeds from growing in the pond.

I have been taking photos of all the wildflowers I find on our property.  I have a Missouri wildflowers book and I have been trying to identify them all, but some of them don't seem to be in the book.  I know the ox-eye daisy, black-eyed Susan, butterfly weed, milkweed, wild carrot (Queen Anne's lace), mullein, morning glory, horse nettle, red clover, wild strawberry, blackberry, thistle, wild rose, and I just saw bee balm starting to bloom.  It is so much fun for me to walk through the pasture and see such a wide variety of wildflowers there.

Now, of course, the pasture has been mowed and baled by our neighbor, Clifford White, so the flowers aren't visible any more until next year.

They came to do the final cleaning yesterday in the new house.  There are still a lot of details that have yet to be finished, so we're not there, yet.  Like doorknobs, paint to be touched up, the yard to be seeded, stuff like that.

Here's a photo of the solar panels being installed on the garage/workshop roof.

The crew from Straight Up Solar did a fantastic job.  They got the whole thing done in just a little more than one day.