Wilted!

We are nearly as wilted by the heat as this basket of weeds which we removed from the pasture Tuesday morning.  Although J. has "bush-hogged" the acreage, he decided we should spot weed the toxic jimson weed.  I am the official locator, then J. uses a viciously sharpened shovel to root out the plants.

This battered thermometer was hanging in the carport when we bought the place.

I'm not sure if it is comforting to watch the needle move past the 90 degree F. mark each day.

The "natives" are telling us that there has not been such an intensely hot summer in local memory.

A number of us had a group grumble after chuch this week regarding the pitiable condition of our gardens.

It is not, we agreed, a good year for tomatoes.

Grasshopper?  Katydid?

The scrape and hum of these creatures is constant, a metallic rasping that hangs in the thick air.

I have encountered toads of varying sizes while working in the garden and near the house.

During yesterdays afternoon rain I found this one chinning itself on the edge of this large flower pot. A rosemary in a smaller pot usually resides here.  I removed the rosemary the better to view the toadlet.

Pebbles seems to take the heat well. Keeping flies away from her face is a problem.

Most days she wears her fly hood. She is very interested in everything that we do around the dooryard or in her pasture.

Maybe this small green insect is the katydid?

Good camoflauge.

This half-grown bunny bounced out of the catnip patch and dithered dementedly before disappearing into the hydrangeas.

The cats have spells of lethargy in spite of the air conditioning.

They rouse to oversee our doings.

Early mornings have been misty with heavy dew.

The wild turkeys have been grubbing in the upper pasture.

No matter how quietly I open the side door, they hear me.  Their long necks stretch out, their bodies seem to flatten as they scuttle toward the woods.

I have devoted several of these stiffling afternoons and evenings to my genealogy projects.

The process of discovery is exciting--a treasure hunt.

I'm now disciplining myself to go through notebooks and transcribe data to the PC.

Eggnog loves to be with me.  She is such a sweet-natured old girl that I attempt to type around her.

The young Amish woman who keeps a tiny general store at the end of the road phoned this morning [6:45!] to announce that the peach order had arrived.

[The area Amish don't have phones in their homes but have one installed somewhere on the property and go outside to make calls.]

 We rush several times per day to answer what turn out to be nuisance calls--recorded solicitations and such.

Maybe we need to locate the phone in the garage!

It has been a long day of feeling that the kitchen needs to be a bigger space at canning time.

A cooking range should be designed especially for large kettles and steamers and canners.

Today's yield is 10 qts of peaches and 7 small jars of preserves.

I know where I will spend tomorrow.

Summer Kitchen

From Northern Farm by Henry Beston

"All morning long the farm has been in a fine, cheerful, and uproarious confusion.  Our friend Louis French the plumber having come to help us, we have been changing over the kitchens, connecting our water system, tuning-up gas engines and redistributing the furniture.
Out went the winter stove and off came the storm shutters, and while we men folk were going upstairs and downstairs checking for leaks and turning on sputtering faucets, Elizabeth and our kind neighbor Barbara Oliver were hunting the winter out of his last hiding places in the closed bedrooms, and putting him to flight through the great front door.  It was hard physical work for all of us, but now that the place is in order again, the house positively glows with a vernal and country saisfaction.

To explain the turmoil, I had best make clear the summer and winter ritual of the house.  Like may of these older farms, we have two kitchens in the ell, a summer one and a winter one, each with its own sink, its chimney, and its running water.  Of the two, the "summer kitchen" is the cooler and more airy, and in some ways the easier to use.  It is a pleasant room with painted white walls, pearl-grey woodwork, old beams left "natural" and a brown linoleum floor.  We sometimes call it the "St. Lawrence kitchen" because some of the old-fashioned jars and containers were picked up by Elizabeth in the river villages.

The "winter kitchen" is the room we turn to when the late autumnal cold begins to close in upon the house.
This is the room which is our final stronghold against the snow.  It is warmer than its summer counterpart and nearer the main house, and there is a sort of primitive cellar lurking beneath the floor.  A huge red brick chimney firepalce built out into the room is here the center of life, cheerful all autumn long with hardwood fires.  Unwilling as we are to close it off, there is always some November day when we seal the fireplace cave with a "fire-front", and set up an old winter stove we store in a corner of the shed. The summer kitchen is then drained, the last fire suffered to go out, the pots and pans tranferred, and the room abandoned to the cold.  Beyond the partition, the pail from the spring becomes our drinking water, the cistern supply our washing water, and the winter range our household diety.

It was on this winter economy we descended this morning like a vernal wolf on the fold.  Lawrence and I worked at the house, the plumber and his helper at the lake, and in an hour or two we had the lake water up the hill and humming in the pipes, and the engine going and the great cypress tank overflowing like water over a dam.  The familiar clank of the cistern pump would be heard no more awhile.  The next thing on the program was the summer kitchen, and here the ladies came to our aid, abandoning whatever they were up to in the front of the house.  In three shakes of a lamb's tail, or so it seemed, they had it in proper order, its pots and pans hanging on the wall, a fire burning in the range and a kettle steaming.

Only one last thing remained to be done, the moving out of the winter stove.  We had built but a small fire in it that morning, and this was now only a bed of ash.  Elizabeth says that we all went for it in a kind of "solemn rush."  It is not a heavy stove, and surrounded by plumbers and by Lawrence and myself, it went very peaceably into the shed.  An easy tug at the fire-front, and there stood the fireplace yawining black, and looking rather sooty and in need of sweeping. I made this my job and, when I had finished, Lawrence drove us all forth and took a pail and mop and did the floor. Tonight, if it is cool, Elizabeth will light the first fire for it is one of my pet superstitions, inherited from a wise and ever-honored grandmother, that the first hearthfire of the year must be lit by the woman of the house.

The winter kitchen now looked very large.  Its windows were open, and all the pleasant world outside seemed full of the singing of birds.  Summer was at hand, the trees were in young leaf, the fields were really green, and the skies were mild and blue,  In the house, too, it was summer again."

Henry Beston was not a prolific writer.  He was a perfectionist, described by his daughter as laboring and groaning over each sentence until it was crafted to his satisfaction.  Henry Beston's beautiful essays have been some of my favorite reading for the past 40 years, during which time I have worn out several copies of his books in paperback editions.  If you would like to learn more about Henry Beston and his wife, Elizabeth Coatsworth Beston, also a writer, you can visit this link, which also has photos of them and of their "northern farm."
http://www.henrybeston.com/northernfarm.html

If money were no object, I would design a house with a "summer ktichen".  It would be on the coolest side of the house, and would have a large sink, propane range, a huge work table and a tile or slate floor. There would be room for baskets of garden produce and all the cumbersome kettles and jars that belong to the season of canning and pickling.

I have always believed that the old farmhouse we once owned in Vermont had, at one time, a summer kitchen. There had been a long covered back porch which connected at one end with an ell room complete with its own chimney and back door.

My grandfather's farmhouse didn't have a summer kitchen. The long ell housed the kitchen and dining room, leaving the main house cool in the summer.

The Amish houses we have viewed here in Kentucky usually have vast heavy wood ranges which provide winter heat as well as the means of preparing meals.

Many of these houses have at least an improvised cooking area for use during hot weather, usually a propane range set up in the shed room which is also used as a wash room.

Our little cottage has a smallish kitchen which J. has renovated with lovely new cabinetry.  The house has central air conditioning which has been chugging away for weeks from mid-day until midnight.

The kitchen floor gets sticky as I carry steamers and kettles from stove to sink.  Garden dirt comes in on the bottom of baskets and buckets.

I have cooked and baked and canned in a tiny inefficient kitchen for years in Vermont, then presided over rather grand custom kitchens in a climate where gardening was a frustration of late spring frosts, early fall frosts, grasshoppers and disputed irrigation rights.

Just now we are climbing over baskets of produce, ranking filled jars along the edge of the counter to cool.

And we think of winter when all this good food will be stashed a few steps away in the basement, a tasty reminder of summer's labors.