It’s a good thing I’m working to get back into keeping Sunday as my day of rest. Last night, for some reason, I just didn’t sleep. I finally started to doze after 4am or so. After a couple of hours of that, I fed the outside cats, then went back to bed, skipping the rest of my morning rounds.
But I did find these, yesterday.
The Albion Everbearing strawberries are starting to ripen, little by little. For a patch with only 8 plants, there are quite a lot of berries on each of them! The deer seem to be leaving this patch alone, too. The ones with the asparagus keep getting their leave eaten, even though I have stakes around them. I have some mesh netting around part of the patch, but need to set up more flexible netting around the rest.
But not today.
This afternoon, I made a quick run into town to get distilled water for my husband’s CPAP. Just one gallon, though. They cost almost twice as much locally as they do in the city, so I’ll get more the next time we need to hit a Walmart or something. Of course, while in town, I picked up a few other things as well.
Just a little while ago, I headed out to do my evening rounds, checking all the garden beds. I’m quite impressed with how much some of the winter squash is getting. Our first Madga squash seedling appeared in one of the pots, but the stem was already broken by a cat lying on it, in spite of the stakes I have around the pot to keep them out. In the main garden area, though, I spotted our first G-star patty pan squash. So we should have at least some summer squash this year – as long as the slugs don’t get to them! We’re down to 1 Zucca melon because they got into the kiddie pool planter.
While I was outside, it suddenly started to thunder and a storm blew in before I finished my rounds. We’re supposed to continue getting these blowing over us for the next few hours. It’s so hot and humid out there, the wind and rain is welcome. It’s not a lot of rain, either; the moats around the garage and the storage house are not coming back. The power flickers, I could do without. I settled down at my computer to start this, and discovered my machine was shut down! I’m not complaining, though. Other places are being hit much harder than we are.
A reminder of why it’s a good idea to “prep”, and have at least three days of shelf stable food, drinking water and other necessities on hand.
My daughter just popped by to chat, so this post was put on hold for a while. As we were talking, another quick storm rolled through. The upstairs has been really hot and muggy, so my daughter did not get much sleep. We’ve been able to keep the downstairs cooler. The portable AC in the living room has been running almost constantly, and we have a fan blowing the cooler air to the dining room. Which means that, in a complete switch, the new part of the house is cooler than the old (log) part of the house, where the bedrooms are. With the septic issues we were having, we moved out the makeshift hardware cloth door, which is kept in place with hook and eye closures, so we could go up and down the stairs more easily. It meant having to close the door to keep the cats out of the basement, though. Now that the source of the septic issues was tracked down and the pump is working as it should, we don’t need access quite as often. So today, I moved one of the blower fans to the bottom of the stairs, facing up, then set the hardware cloth door back. We now have cool basement air being blown up the stairs and, my goodness, what a difference it has made! The only downside is, the distinct smell of wet basement. 😄
I just got some messages from the Cat Lady. The system that hit us is now hitting them. The Wolfman has been freaking out with every peel of thunder, the poor thing! They’re getting the power fluctuations, too. After this, though, things are clearing up, so we should be good for the next while. In fact, if the long range forecast is anything to go by, we won’t get rain again for about 2 weeks.
We might actually dry up enough that we can bring the truck into the yard and pull that tree off the outhouse!
Wouldn’t that be nice?
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 