Weekly Update: 7.5.26
Of gardening, heat waves, and air conditioners
After the cool, rainy June, summer finally arrived with July — with all its blessings and curses. The oppressive heat has made progress outside a bit difficult, as several of us found ourselves struggling to stay hydrated and feeling overheated. At the same time, the blue skies and hot afternoons make for a nostalgic fun. We’ve enjoyed hosing off outside, eating drippy popsicles, playing in the creek, and churning homemade ice cream.
Throughout the week, our biggest focus was our garden. Now that it is July, we can finally get all of our cucurbit seedlings in the ground. Grace and I spent every morning setting up trellises, shaping rows, leveling and filling squash boxes, and planting seedlings. Bonnie-Jean helped with plant care, spraying neem, applying coffee grounds, and repotting tiny plants that aren’t quite ready to go to the garden. Our new drip tape arrived in the mail, and we rolled some out to all our new growing areas. We put out the rest of our cucumbers this week, as well as our pumpkins and most of our melons. We direct seeded some rows of corn within our pumpkin patch in hopes the squash will discourage the raccoons this year.
As I’ve written before, we waited until July to put out most of our cucurbits in hopes we won’t be as overrun with squash bugs as we were last year. I’m interested to see if it was worth the wait. It was so dreadfully hot that I worry about the newly transplanted plants being stressed. It’s also significantly less pleasant doing major dirt work by hand in July than it is in May. Granted, we ought to have had the garden done by now, but all the rain this year made that difficult. Still, we have just three trays of plants left, which is exciting. We should be able to complete the task in the coming week.
When we weren’t working in the garden, we were prepping for the next round of homestead insanity. Bonnie-Jean’s dog Tilde is supposed to have puppies this month. We plan for the pups to spend most of their time in the kennel, but when they are first born, they will be too young to regulate their own body temperature. After some discussion, we decided to let Tilde whelp in the bunkhouse like she did last time. We talked about making space for her in the living room, but since mother dogs can get aggressive with other animals, we opted to isolate Tilde in the space we sisters usually share. As we considered how to rearrange the room so that we could make a place for a whelping box, we decided to do something incredibly crazy — convert two of our beds into a “sectional” in the living room.
It was a good opportunity to do some deep cleaning — and to realize how much more cleaning we need to do. We spent one afternoon rearranging all of our furniture. Then the next day, we put together a very simple “back” for the “sectional”. The end result is fun and surprisingly cute. In the few days since moving things, the whole family has been loving the comfortable seating in our living room. When we put things back to normal after the puppies, we are already talking about building a custom sized couch to fit our space.
In the middle of our heat wave, one of our air conditioning units decided to quit working. We tried several fixes, but after a couple days, it quit completely. We ordered a replacement we hope will work better, but in the mean time, it was difficult to keep the bunkhouse below 80 degrees during the day. Thank goodness for fans — we’ve had them going all over the place.
The week ended with the United States of America turning 250 years old. Fan fair flourished throughout the country, as we all celebrated in our own individual ways. I had wanted to go to our local celebration this year, as I always enjoy Dadeville’s parade and picnic. After spending so many days out working in the sun this week, though, I just didn’t feel like it. Instead, I opted for a quiet day celebrating at home. I hoped to just sip a cool drink, sit by a fan, and enjoy time with my family. As so often happens, however, reality turned out differently. Our new air conditioning unit showed up early, which was a huge blessing — but it required some assembly and installation. So, Grace and I grabbed a drill and went to work.
It turned out to be a rather anticlimactic holiday for us. And really, I didn’t feel ready for our America’s big 250th birthday anyway. I had wanted to take some time to reflect on our history as a country and research our ancestors that fought in the revolutionary war — including our supposed distant cousin, Gen. George Washington (Ancestry.com suggests the connection on both sides of the family, which is news to us). Instead, I’ve been busy living in the present. Part of me was a bit disappointed yesterday, but the other part of me felt like it was rather fitting. Our founding fathers were normal people. Many of them were farmers and homesteaders themselves. They didn’t set aside time to make history — they simply lived it in their daily choices. I may not have watched fireworks or attended a barbecue this year, but I was thankful for the freedom I had to just live the life I’ve chosen. And once we fired up the new air conditioning unit and the bunkhouse started cooling down, I felt quite celebratory.
That is, until our other main air conditioning unit started to smell like burning plastic. I have a feeling we’ll be in for another round of attempted repairs after Mass this afternoon. Such is our stressful, blessed, chaotic, beautiful life.
