We are still moving forward in our adventure in living green. There is so much to do and so much going on. My apologies for not blogging about more of it.
The end of school came... with tons of activities... and left.
Summer began... with rains and floods...
...and more rains... and more flooding...
We had our first attempts at gardening flooded and washed away. :(
The second round sat in six inches of water for four or five weeks. A few plants managed to survive that!
We have six tomato plants that seem to be doing fairly well. There's one cucumber vine, still without any blossoms or cucumbers, so while the vine grew, that's all it did. The same can be said for the watermelons too. The snap peas seemed to be growing again... but they gave it up after the 3rd flooding in less than 6 weeks. The strawberries, lettuces, carrots, onions, and various peppers are all gone and gave up the fight long ago.
In the meantime, flooding in many areas near us meant higher prices for lots of things - IF - if we could even get them! It's pretty weird going to Wal-Mart, a store that is known for having absolutely everything around here, and finding more shelves empty than full!!! The whole month of June seemed to be that way. And even now, at nearly the middle of August there are still many times when shelves are left empty! So many area roads were damaged and still awaiting repairs to reopen.
Not too far from us the heavy rains actually caused the loss of an entire lake! This lake is in an area that gets a lot of tourists, plus it's great (or was) for fishing. The dam didn't break (that's what everyone thought at first), but the heavy rains weakened an area just to the side of where the dam is built; soaked so much that currents from all the rainfall upstream were overloading the dam and stressing the mud to the point that it washed away.... emptied out nearly the entire lake in a matter of hours and of course created MORE FLOOD DAMAGE downstream!
I hear there are some farmers - people who depend on farm crops for income - who lost all of their first planting; then most of their second planting; and are now left with a fraction of what they expected to have to sell this harvest season. And to add to that, many had their homes flooded as well. For us, the flooding never hit the house - came awfully close more than once - but we stayed dry inside. Still, my heart goes out to those less fortunate in this very wet growing season up here this year.
I'm sure there's a connection from the flooding to the mild summer season we're having now. There's only been one or two days so far that temps even got into the 90s! Most days are upper 70s or low 80s and the nights cool down into the 50s and even a few 40s. It's nice. It would be nicer if the mosquitoes would be somewhere else. :)
We have 23 days remaining before our next school year begins!
We still have many summer projects yet to complete before then! So the days are still very busy.
Sewing lessons are progressing - in hopes of making clothes instead of buying them at retail costs.
Everyone is getting used to using a new push-reel mower to cut the grass (weeds) instead of the old gas-powered mower.
We are also doing much better at eating fresher foods and avoiding more processed foods!
We only have 3 more light bulbs to go before every light in the house is switched away from incandescent bulbs - to either compact florescent or full-spectrum bulbs.
We are much better at remembering our fabric bags for shopping and have nearly used up our supply of plastic shopping bags from various stores.
We've done well at cutting down usage for electricity, natural gas, even gasoline for the car. The down side is that their prices all went up - so it didn't actually save us any money. But I can be happy that we didn't have the larger bills to pay!!! :) I'm sure the milder summer contributed to lowering these in most cases - so the real test may be in how low we can keep usage during the winter months... especially if the prices keep going up!!!
