Hot Hot Heat

I am not a hot weather person.  Unless it is accompanied by a pool-side lounge chair with a good book and an ice cold pina colada, on a kid-free beach holiday, 30+ degree weather is not welcome.  It makes me more ornery than Charlie on farrier day.  This is my explanation for my abrupt break from the farm blog - a protest of the "extended stretch" of "record-breaking" "sweltering" weather (if I can quote the news from the past week).  Thanks to a combination of getting air conditioning installed in our house (thank you Ian for agreeing and Mat from Home Climate Pro for doing the installation - seriously, our house was 34 degrees C) and the heat wave finally breaking on Friday (it went down to 11 degrees C last night - yes!), life can now return to normal.

As much as I was not thrilled about the ridiculous heat, the vegetable gardens loved it.  With the combination of my daily watering and the heat, the veggies doubled in size in a week.  Unfortunately, so did the weeds.  When I finally took a good look at everything on Friday the garden was a disaster - a verifiable jungle of craziness.

Today, with the help of Ian (husband extraordinare), my brother Kyle (weeder and support system extraordinare) and Daphne (teenaged kid minder extraordinare), we had all of the vegetable gardens back under control in four hours.  Granted, our work hours combined totalled 12 hours of weeding and 4 hours of kid watching, but who's counting?

I am not sure we have ever had all the vegetable gardens ship shape at the same time.  Now is the time to run garden tours if there ever was one!  So here is the virtual tour...

Top to bottom: lettuce, radishes, chard, basil, onions, zinnias on the side.

Top to bottom: cabbage, marigolds, peas.

Top to bottom: raspberries, cabbage, kale, brussels sprouts.

Left to right: eggplant, beans, turnip, broccoli.

Left to right: peas, beans, carrots, beets, corn.

Sweet corn.

Left to right: kale, potatoes, onions, hull-less pumpkin.

Squash patch.

Left to right: tomatoes, cucumbers.

Left to right: zucchini, garlic, zinnias.

Beans flowering.

Corn tops.

Pea pods.

Kale crown.

Cucumber flower.

Any cabbage patch kids in there?

A beauty of a cabbage.  Coleslaw here we come!

A row of marigolds in memory of Grandpa Ed.

Parsley patch (with one rogue weed right at the front that I will pull tomorrow!).

Sweet basil.

It feels so good to have the garden back in working order, especially since the weather network is calling for a return to hot weather starting tomorrow.  Is it Fall yet?