hot, continued

I am on the mailing lists of three farming families. They send newsy updates every week or so and last night I heard from them all. Their stories were uniformly grim: the wild weather this spring has really messed with the growing season. One weekend, a farmer sprayed water to keep his crops from freezing during that unexpected late coming of night frost and the next weekend he was spraying again, this time to help his crop weather the unusually high temperatures. And it's been in the 80sF and 90sF (upwards of 30C) ever since. With no rain. I read reports of crop failures and of necessary purchases of miles of drip hose. And there's no end in sight. The skies are clear, the air is hot. And so it shall continue.

On the upside, some plants do like (or at least tolerate) heat, and drip lines aren't prohibitively expensive (though putting them in properly is time consuming, which is why I don't use them). All is not lost. But it is a challenging spring.

Morning walk? Hot! This is what summer phlox looks like!

(The first sweat pea...)

Morning breakfast -- on the porch, but we're chasing the shade and we have the fan going.

 

 

 

Immediately after, the two older kids come over for a morning here. They're a little spooked by my message to them this weekend. I'd said "watch out for the deer flies." This is a necessary warning during the intense deer fly season because if you inadvertently allow a fly to follow you into the car, it can be a miserable ride for all. Luckily, our deer fly population seems to have gone down substantially (theirs is a short season), but still, every time something buzzed nearby, Snowdrop would ask in alarm -- is that a black fly? Sparrow seemed to take it in stride. Bug bites aren't firmly implanted in his three year old sensibilities.

Flies, or the threat of flies and the real hot air chase the kids inside. Oh, the safe cool haven of the farmhouse during a heat wave!

Toward lunchtime we pile into the car for the trip home. As I back out of the driveway, I hardly notice that the radio is on. It always comes on when I crank the engine. Who knows why. Anyway, there's some very lovely chamber music playing and I'm tempted to leave it on, but I hear protest from the back seat.

I don't like classical music. (This from Snowdrop.)

Why?

It's too sad.

Oh yes. It's so easy to be overwhelmed by something astonishingly beautiful, but of course, this is just a small chamber piece!  I wonder if she will change her mind once she begins seriously taking up a musical instrument.

Sparrow lightens the moment by chiming in with something silly and funny and we switch to discussing where we get our ideas for names.

In the afternoon, I have a visitor. A friend whom I have not seen for a while. Someone longtime Ocean reader might have known from the early years of blogging. We were a group of six bloggers and we would routinely get together over a meal, with lots of carefully prepared food, wonderfully paired wine and six laptops turned on to our common interest. We not only blogged, ate and drank together, some of us went so far as to travel together. I said -- come to Poland and they did.

He and his wife recently moved nearby and we discovered that we share a CSA now and so here we are, meeting up again, though without the computers or wines or even foods. Just stories. From all those years of navigating life as presidents came and went, grandchildren came and stayed, and a pandemic raged.

In the late afternoon, I turn on the hose. I have to. Up to now, I've only watered the new plants. This time, I include old ones as well. It has come to that. My pause from garden work was very short indeed.  

I don't care what the calendar says. Summer has surely arrived.

(Today, in our CSA veggie box)