From time to time I look back at the most popular posts of the last few months to see what I've been writing about that is of wider interest than normal. For each of these, it's worth revisiting the story to see what I missed at the time of writing it and where there's an opportunity to follow up with more information.

Today's links look at the continuing stories of people getting tickets for plantings on their lawn extensions, the cleanup at the Fermi 2 nuclear plant after the tornadoes that hit the facility after they blew through Dundee, and a juneberry pie recipe that I missed.

FOIA Friday: lawn extension plantings

I write a FOIA Friday column each week, which delves into the slow and sometimes frustrating process of understanding the workings of the world as seen through public records and government documents. Usually the traffic for these pages is limited by the subject matter, which is just as esoteric as my management allows me to write about.

One issue that came up and got much more attention than I expected was my piece on planting on your lawn extension, and the notices that a variety of people across the city received for having lawn extension plantings that were too tall. These so-called "day lily tickets" are still being issued, as Thomas Petlet's Community Wall posting of June 16 notes. In Woodsman, spare that bush, he writes

When a warning is issued, only 24 hours are allowed for remediation, which in this case means eliminating the bush. Last year, my property sported a bush that was about four feet high and had been in the same location for more than 30 years. Suddenly a warning appeared tacked to the house. No one saw this note the next day, so the city came by and cut it to three feet, charging us for the service and tacking on a fine as well. Our protest of inadequate warning fell on deaf ears. A city attorney suggested that the only smart thing to do was remove the bush entirely. We opted to retain the aesthetics.

This is worth a followup; at the time, I managed to frustrate myself into inaction and never filed a FOIA request for the information that I was seeking. Since then, Ann Arbor Police Records has updated the AAPD FOIA Form (PC-1171; PDF) so that a citizen making a request can type it in legibly into the editable PDF form for ease of processing and review.

Severe weather

When severe weather hits in the summertime, people in Michigan head for their basements with their mobile phones, laptops, emergency scanners and sump pump repair manuals to ride out the storm. The storms of June 5-6 prompted some writing that got more traffic than normal.

On June 1, before the worst of the storms hit, I wrote up a links list on tracking Ann Arbor severe weather. I still go back to that page to make sure I haven't missed details of radars, communications networks, meters, monitors and gauges that help you figure out storm tracks.

After the storm, I put together a map of storm damage across the area as best I could from published reports. Immediately after an incident like this it's really hard to figure out what's going on, because people are scrambling to restore power and cut down fallen trees and protect their families and communities. News gathering takes a back seat to emergency management.

The one story that didn't get completely told at the time is what happened to Fermi 2, the nuclear power plant along the shores of Lake Erie in Monroe County that was in the middle of a storm track. Wednesday's Toledo Blade runs the story that Fermi 2 is back online, after crews cleared hundreds of truckloads of debris and replaced the roof of the plant's turbine building.

Berry picking and mushroom hunting

My seasonal writing about morel mushroom hunting in May was at the top of the list. It got picked up by the weblog called simply morelmushrooms.blogspot.com, a little news aggregator that pops up like a mushroom every year in April, May, June and July to collect morel stories from the news.

A story on U-pick strawberries in June was picked up by Absolute Michigan, a collection of links, features, news and information about the state of Michigan. Andy McFarlane has been running that site since 2003 and is particularly diligent about collecting seasonal information about Michigan events and places of interest. The Absolute Michigan photo pool on Flickr has almost 100,000 photos from around the state, and the companion photo blog Michigan in Pictures features one of these each day.

Who knew that so many people would take interest in juneberry season? The most interesting relevant search term that found that page was juneberry pie recipe; I don't think I did a particularly good job of providing one, but if you haven't made a pie yet, this juneberry pie from the Minnesota Farm Guide looks so unfussy that it must have been made every season for years.

Edward Vielmetti is the lead blogger at AnnArbor.com.