Weekly Update: 8.9.25
“I feel like the weeks have been going by faster than ever lately,” Grace gave me an exasperated look as we stood in our kitchen, mentally tallying our to-dos for the next few days.
She was right. Time has been absolutely flying. Our days have been full, and we are making progress — but with so many proverbial irons in the fire, our progress sometimes feels painfully slow. Still, at least there is progress.
We’ve been working on our exterior siding every day. A bunch of us put in a solid day’s work on Saturday. For the rest of the week, my brother Jeremiah and I worked on it in the early mornings. He has a full-time remote job, but he made time every day to get some siding done before it was brutally hot outside. When my dad was home, he and I worked on it as well.
When we weren’t hanging siding, we were prepping siding. We have mentioned before that we are making our siding out of cedar fence pickets. To make the cedar last longer, we are dipping it in Eco Wood Treatment — a one-step finish that never has to be reapplied. The treatment turns the wood a silvery weathered color, which we love.
Grace and I also continued to sand, stain, and assemble our interior barn door kits.
When it was too hot to work outside, we have been busy inside. We are still freezing veggies and making pickles. My mom discovered a delicious summer squash curry soup that I cannot get enough of.
We’ve also been working on storage organization. With so many people in our little bunkhouse, we are having to be creative with how we store our belongings.
Last Saturday, our brother Jeremiah and I moved our new bee swarm into our last open hive. It was our Langstroth hive, which worked out better than we could have foreseen. Our niece Chloe came along to help out, which made it all the more fun.
It seems the bees have been in the swarm traps for a few weeks — probably since we got sick (and stopped checking the trap, which we assumed would stay empty anyway). Instead of building comb on the frames, the bees had built large pieces of comb attached to the bottom of each frame. When we opened the trap after dark on Saturday night, we had to make a quick decision on how to move the bees into their permanent home. We grabbed an extra super and removed almost all of the frames. Then we stacked a second super on top, installing the frames from the trap so the comb could hang down into the bottom super. The situation is not ideal — but we weren’t sure what else to do in that moment.
We’ve been working hard to keep up with pest control in our garden. Our new Black+Decker dustbuster arrived this week, and we put it to good use right away. Grace has been spending about an hour a day sucking up squash bugs and blister beetles.
We got to taste our first sampling of melons from our garden this week. After getting some sort of fungus last month, our melon plants have really struggled — and I think most of them aren’t going to last. Still, we were so excited to harvest our first watermelon early this week. Since we’ve been dealing with fungus, my expectations were low — but the flesh was both sweet and flavorful.
Later in the week, our first cantaloupes turned yellow and began slipping off the vine — a sure sign of ripe fruit. I have tried to grow cantaloupes before, but they’ve always been flavorless. These were delicious. I couldn’t have been more thrilled.
The week went too quickly, but it was full of sweet moments. August is well underway, and the hottest days of summer are still upon us. The garden is producing in full force, and the long days are filling time with so much light. And yet, the honey locust leaves are becoming gold confetti, beginning again to sprinkle the woodland earth. It’s a small reminder to enjoy each summer day while it lasts — with weeks slipping by so quickly, the seasons will change before we know it.
