It’s only been two weeks, but we are in the full swing of summer. (There’s already been a camping trip, for crying out loud. And swimming lessons. [I think this might be our last summer of doing them—Starling is swimming so well.])
(The weather, blessedly, has not been too summery. Lots of days of windows open and temperatures in the 70s.)
I’ve been waking up earlier than in any summer of the past (6:15) to see Jesse off, exercise the muscles around my knee, and try a bit of walking (the last few minutes of each walk a tentative, fingers-crossed run). I often get to hug Mike goodbye as I’m coming or going then water and get a few things done before most of the kids are even up.
So that’s all lovely.
And then I pass out cold nearly everywhere I am throughout the entire rest of the day. (I was sound asleep on a tiny, hard-backed chair at Star’s swimming lesson yesterday. And … I feel my eyes drooping even as I type this.)
Jesse’s first official job is working up at Utah State on their irrigation crew. It boggles the mind, but somehow there are enough sprinkler heads and filters needing replaced, pipes needing dug up and repaired, etc. to keep him busy eight hours a day. He comes home exhausted and covered in dirt and tells us how he can never look at a lawn mower now without wondering just how many sprinkler heads it might have just broken. And he has an app that controls all of the sprinklers on the entire USU campus—an awful lot of power for a teenage boy to be given. But I guess … with great power comes great responsibility and all that.
I mentioned my morning watering. It’s mostly all for show (or lack of show rather). All of my flowers have continued to die. (They’ve withered so terribly that my garden now resembles—fairly closely actually—Ursula the Sea Witch’s garden of enslaved souls. [See the picture below in case you’ve forgotten.])
When I mentioned this similarity to Jesse, he was forced to admit that my flower bed did look like an evil villain’s garden.
It’s quite a tragedy.
But! Mike and I have finally determined the problem. Over fertilization. It was the manure we added. It was from a years-old pile—mixed with weeds and what not. I wasn’t certain it would still have enough potency to do anything, much less burn everything we lovingly and laboriously planted. But that’s just what it has done.
It’s a great disappointment to me to know my flower beds will not be this year. (We simply can’t spend that much again to start all over this season. We will have to till a ton of peat moss in next year to try and neutralize everything a bit.)
On the other hand, I am comforted to know the cause of my failure. I really was beginning to think growing flowers was actual rocket science—and I was the only one too simple-minded to learn it.
Our tree watering, on the other hand, is coming along nicely. The kids grumble and moan when I announce that it’s a tree watering day. But we’ve come up with a pretty great system. Hans, Mette, and Summer fill buckets and drive them on four wheelers down the drive, then Anders and I carry them over to each of the 16 trees for watering.
One other fun discovery this summer? Fox Hill. Or fox … den … village? Fox lair? (Lairs plural.)
It’s at the very back of our property just across the ditch (so technically on a piece of land owned by I don’t know who). But Mike suspected the spot, so we all walked back there one evening and found an area full of multiple fox holes. It was actually a bit like a scene from some horror movie—carcasses and bones everywhere. “What terror have we stumbled upon?” To be fair, they were mostly just marmot carcasses and duck wings and bones. But they were everywhere! Take heed marmots! (The marmots are not taking heed. I saw one looking over the canal mere feet from the fox dens a few days later.)
In any case, that’s all for now. (I’ll end, as I generally do, with whatever pictures I’ve got sitting about.)
