I'll Get You with my Death Bag

All is not especially well here at Steepmeadow.  The Japanese beetles have been out in force, trying their best to destroy our fruit trees and raspberries, and generally being hideous to look upon. 

We have had a near record run of 90 degree days (32 degrees Celsius, if you live in a civilized part of the world). 77,000 acres have burned (so far) in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, and we have been choking on the fumes. I'm painfully aware of this because that was where I was supposed to be with my kid for our annual vacation this past weekend. 

Instead of the BWCA, we went to Myre-Big Island State Park near Albert Lea near the Iowa border. It was lovely in many ways. Very, very hot (90's & humid). But the prairie is a gorgeous place, too. Many flowers. Many, many birds (including pelicans!). But there was Eurasian milfoil, coating the murky Albert Lea Lake. 

Back on the home front, we lost our zucchini to irregular watering. Containers are apparently too susceptible to drying out in the furnace-like heat.  

In the positive column, some of the first tomatoes have arrived from the "cheater" cherry tomato plants. There's a pumpkin starting. The purple coneflowers are out. We have clean lettuce, and a fresh row that was succession planted is coming in now. This is important, because Taylor Farms, which controls much of the fresh produce shipped all over the country, is dealing with a cyclospora outbreak. This causes explosive diarrhea. Taco Bell has been, apparently, the most reliable tracker of this phenomenon, since the federal government has been hamstrung by fascist white supremacist incompetence and their never-ending fountain of lies.  

With the shifting weather and the shortness of time, some plans for next year are coming into focus. 

Three raised beds are going to be taken out of commission and turned to prairie wildflower beds. Two of them are now shaded by the neighbor's stupid sucker tree that they let grow. The strawberry bed - one puny 8'x4' bed, provides us with ~ a handful of berries a year. It's just not worth it. It's buried between the raspberries and the lilac. Too much shade.

We may be adding more than that, depending on what things look like when the worthless, lazy contractors we hired to allegedly remove our collapsing deck supposedly finish the job by grading the wreckage. There's some very expensive carpentry work that will be necessary to fix the mess that the Hated Previous Owners inflicted on the house by improperly installing said deck.

So, basically, things are in a pretty bad place. I was telling the kid: When I was growing up, we didn't have Eurasian milfoil poisoning our lakes. There were forest fires, yes, but not these massive climate change fueled disasters. There was NEVER wildfire smoke to worry about in Minnesota. The federal government was not actually the enemy of freedom, and never sent masked men into the streets to round people up, shoot them, or disappear them into concentration camps. That happened in (other) shithole countries. Until recently, it was possible to train for a marathon in the summer. Good luck with that now. 

We live in hell, and everything is getting worse.