I am feeling much better this week. The baby rabbit kept finding a way into the garden and eating all of my bush and soup beans, some squash blossoms, and nibbling on the sweet potato vines but I just feel resigned. James and I chase the poor scared little Bun around the garden, trying to herd them out of the gate. Our nextdoor neighbor has two dogs and James asked her yesterday if they were good at catching rabbits and if we could borrow them. She wasn’t sure if James was being serious or not (he wasn’t), which made listening to the exchange and watching her expression greatly entertaining for me.

This morning we were out in the garden early and there was the little Bun. There were two exit points available and we are 99% sure they took one of them, though we didn’t actually see it happen. Suddenly Bun was gone. We went around the garden with our Bun herding sticks, shaking the shrubs and arugula thickets, rattling the nettles and poking behind the compost bin. Three times we circumnavigated the garden each from a different direction, and no sign of Bun. Three is such a magical number that Bun must truly be gone, right? James got to work and closed up the two exit points so, hopefully, Bun cannot find a way back into the garden.

Friday on my evening tour around the garden I discovered the sparrows had missed a gooseberry! It was hiding beneath a leaf and was likely still green when the sparrows conducted their raid. I picked it and added it to my Saturday oatmeal. When I spooned it up I paused, this is the only gooseberry this year. Into my mouth, and I bit down, a lovely little pop of sweetness. Best gooseberry I have ever had! An instance of scarcity making it taste that much better.

Today I started harvesting the garlic. About a third of the bed was ready to dig up. They did really well this year. The bubils I saved from last year’s garlic and planted last fall that had sprung up so vigorously in early spring, all died in sudden heat at the end of May. The drought did not help them either. I will try again next year as I allowed several garlic plants to flower.

The heat that has been sitting over the southern United States is heading our way and will arrive tomorrow. We will be above 90F/32C all week with the chance of reaching 100F/38C on Wednesday and Thursday. At least it is only a week.

To try and help the garden with the stress, I have made a little shade for the cabbages, the zucchini, and the Kentucky Wonder pole beans and bell peppers by making little row cover canopies and drapes. There is a slight breeze in the garden and the drape in front of the pole beans looks a bit ghostly, though James thought I left a sheet on the clothesline.

To help the chickens with the heat, James has cubed a couple of cucumbers and frozen them. The chickens will get cucumber ice cubes to snack on during the week. Hopefully there will be some breeze to move the air, but if not, we are prepared to put a small fan outside the wire of the run pointed in at them so they get some air circulation.

I feel like I am preparing to hunker down and endure a week of hell as best I can. People from warm places generally ask in wonder how I can possibly tolerate living in a place that can get down to -20F/-29C in winter with even colder windchill. But it’s pretty easy to get warm, even when I am outdoors biking in the cold. Extreme cold is nothing to mess with, I have a healthy respect for it and take all proper care since a person can get frostbite within minutes below certain temperatures.

The heat though? Keeping cool is hard. I grew up in southern California without air conditioning and remember getting to go home from school early some days when the temperature reached 90F/32C before noon. While 100F/38C was not uncommon, it was generally only a day or two. I suppose I was acclimated, because these days, 90F is way too hot, and I can’t imagine how all those people in Phoenix have been managing to get by living for over two weeks with a daily temperature of 110F/43C or more. You can’t go outside in that heat and not suffer. Whereas I can go outside in the bitter cold and be just fine.

But the heat is coming for us all. My mom, who still lives in the house I grew up in, had central air conditioning installed only a day before the heat wave arrived. I am glad she was able to afford the high price tag to have that done. I have central air conditioning in my house too. Not everyone is so privileged. There are many people in Minnesota and other places who do not have air conditioning because twenty years ago it was pretty easy to get along without it. Those days are long gone.

James and I, the chickens and the garden just have to make it through this week before we feel the relatively cool bliss of 85F/29.5 on Saturday. We are lucky it’s just a week and the humidity is not excessive. If you are in the heat, take care of yourself and keep safe.

Reading

• Book: Soil: A Black Mother’s Garden by Camille T. Dungy. Racism, gardening, climate, motherhood. Dungy criticizes the lone male environmental writing that is so popular, which is also being taken up by women who are child-free. Where are the mothers? She can count a few exceptions such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, but for the most part, mothers, especially Black mothers, are left out of the narrative of what counts as important environmental writing. But I think Dungy makes a good argument for why a mother’s perspective is important and necessary.
• Article: Florida will require students to learn enslaved people “benefited” from slavery. Yup, that’s right folks. Florida middle school teachers will be required to tell their students that slaves “gained a ‘personal benefit’ from the skills they learned under slavery before the Civil War.” When is this shit going to stop? Something like this has to be against the law. And if it’s not, then why not?

Listening

• Podcast: The War on Cars: Traffication with Paul Donald. Donald talks about his new book called Traffication, a term he coined. Cars destroy nature and it’s not just because they run on fossil fuels. The book was just published and none of my local libraries have it yet. I will be patient and get the book through interlibrary loan if I need to. I happen to know a really fantastic librarian who is in charge of the ILL department at her library (that’s be me in case you’re wondering).

Watching

• Series: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It’s not my favorite iteration of Star Trek, and it’s definitely not as socially and politically edgy at Star Trek: Discovery, but it’s got some good characters and is entertaining.

Quote

Ecological thought, conservationist thought, the thoughts of the gardener—these should foster nurturing and collaborative relationships with other life-forms, including those we’ve long called wild. This planet is home to us all. All who live in this house are family. What folly to separate the urgent life will of the hollyhock outside my door from the other lives, the family, I hold dear. My life demands a radically domestic ecological thought.

Camille Dungy, Soil: A Black Mother’s Garden, page 130

James’s Kitchen Wizardry