Summer Daze...

The hot days have set in.
One just feels lazy in the middle of the afternoon, the world just too bright to look at. So we go to the river or hide in the shade, relaxing, or do indoor work where it's cooler.

Mornings are when we get the real work done. Today we cleaned the hencoop ( see our Taj Mahal for chickens here: Coopus Optimus ). A simple pleasure, if aromatic & dusty. I love that it is easy with our new coop. And it is always such a feeling of accomplishment to see the clean coop with sweet smelling wood shavings on the floor and a trailer load of manure to compost for the garden.

Garden work gets done early, too. Harvesting, hand watering, tying up tomatoes and such. I know when the shade leaves each part of the garden, and work along that schedule.

On a weekend like this it is our pleasure to take some of the day to read in the shade or hike down to the river. Such a rare luxury most of the year due to weather or our busy agenda. There is usually a breeze to temper the heat.

Tempering the heat in our off-grid home uses some old-style techniques. Air conditioners are energy hogs, and just not something we own. It starts with having a well insulated house. Opening all the (screened) windows and doors overnight cools the house. As soon as the outdoor temperature starts to rise we shut it all down. We close the curtains on the sunny side of the house. The house stays at least 20 degrees cooler than outside most of the day. We supplement this with a ceiling fan or other fan to move the air when it is exceptionally warm out, and an oscillating fan in the room where we are if it is really, really, hot indoors (only a few days a year). Our solar attic fan keeps air moving as well and cools the ceiling. It also draws air up through the vent in our pantry.

Old houses always had small or large vented pantries, and we use this method as well. A vent from under the house lets in cool air and a vent, often chimney-like, exhausts warmer air up out of the insulated room (or cupboard). It will be 10 degrees or so cooler in there than in the rest of the house.
While not as cool as a refrigerator, we are able to store many things besides canned goods, including fruit, dry goods, and eggs! We never refrigerate eggs. If you do not wash them when you bring them in from the hencoop, they will keep just fine. If it gets really, really hot for an extended period of time we will take the eggs down into our root cellar.

Just as they are named, root cellars are traditionally used to store root crops such as potatoes. In the fall we fill the cellar with apples (that haven't been pressed into cider), potatoes & lugs of peppers. Amazingly the peppers last well into the new year, fresh, in the cellar. We only lose a few to mold or drying up. We also keep sealed jars of dried fruit and vegetables, canned goods that won't fit in the pantry, and wine, down in the cellar. It stays around 54 degrees F. all year round.

Well, enough of this. It's Saturday and I promised myself a break with my book and a glass of ice tea. Its 91 outside and rising, but there's a nice breeze and I can hear that hammock calling...

Time out of place...

partly sunny

17th of July, half the United States is baking under the sun and suffering from drought, and we are still waiting for something like real summer weather. Our winter lasted well into June and weather conditions stay off-kilter from what we used to consider the norm.

Not like the TV weather ever mentions the words "climate change" during these months of extreme weather events here and around the globe, but something in the weather has definitely been changing over the past few years. Living close to the land makes that more obvious.

Plants and animals are getting thrown off their timing so we have had stuff blooming early and other things coming on late. Mostly late.  Currently I am noticing that all my alliums (onions, garlic, shallots) are going to flower. The onions & shallots are early, the garlic is late. The garlic should have been ready to harvest last month, but isn't ready yet. Beets and radishes are flowering before making, well, beets and radishes. Lavender usually blooms in June here, and we should have been picking Tayberries then, too, but they are both now just starting to come on. Our Yellow May-blooming waterlilies waited until the end of June, but they may have been delayed by the deeper water level in our pond. The garden sits, suspended, and when the rare warm day comes everything grows like mad only to stop as it cools back down.

Fruit trees that try to bloom at the normal time have not been well pollinated the past few years not, as ordinarily sometimes happened, by late rains, but by freezing snow! At least it appears we will have some fruit this year.

The insect population has been effected - honeybees (who have a lot of environmental burdens these days) are relatively scarce, but so are Yellowjackets, oddly. A nice thing in some ways, but I know there is a corner of the ecological balance that they fill, too. The higher humidity, of course, leads to plenty of mosquitoes. But for mid-July, many other insects seem to be in smaller numbers - and also the birds that feed on them.

I'm curious - what have you noticed?