Things, as we know, don’t always go as planned. The big news around these parts is that I’m pregnant, expecting a baby in October. That’s not the unplanned element; the unplanned part was the way in which this situation (and all the accompanying ailments, small and large) coincided with a terribly hot spring that has continued into into a miserably hot summer. As a result, I’ve done very little over the past few months in the way of the sorts of things I normally write about here: cooking, hiking, gardening, birding, et cetera. Since I don’t plan to turn this into a parenting chronicle, I’ve been silent.

All of my plans for the garden have fallen by the wayside: it’s hanging in there (thank you, drought-tolerant natives), but we’ve done little to encourage or develop it. The rose for which I had such high hopes (and for which I bought the pyramid trellis, about which I never blogged because I was absorbed with other things) has turned out to be only a sprout of the stock variety, not the vigorous New Dawn climber we were expecting. So, we’re going to uproot it and move the Blaze climber from the backyard to the trellis this autumn, after adding more compost to the soil over the course of the summer. It won’t be as striking as the pale rose would be, but it should be nice enough. I had great plans to use the excavated dirt from the dry well that was installed as part of the completed basement project (another event I planned to write about this spring but never did) to grade the side of the house where the worst water problems recur, but we haven’t gotten around to that and now it’s just too hot and dry to undertake a project of that nature. On the positive side (hah!) the two little struggling azaleas in that spot totally gave up the ghost this past month, so that’s fewer plants we’d have to worry about relocating. In all seriousness, we just haven’t had the mental or physical energy to make a plan for a new garden on that side of the house, dig up the turf, move the plants at the side of the house, layer the dirt, and then reseed or replant or do whatever it is that we’ll do for which we don’t yet have a plan. I’m not sure what that means for the future of the pile of dirt, but it does mean that the side of the house will be grass that slopes toward our house for one more year.

On the food front, we’re trying a new farm share this summer, through Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative (LFFC). We’ve generally loved subscribing to Even’Star Organic Farm (and hope to be allowed back into the winter share), so the choice to try something new in the summer was a tough one. We were swayed by a few factors: LFFC is farther north, and I hoped that would mean that we might see more of the crops that Brett struggles to grow organically in the local heat and humidity; they offer a half share which we thought might be more manageable, especially as my interest and energy for cooking has waned these past months (more on that momentarily); and we were able to also purchase a fruit share, which I again hoped would be less pesticide-laden than what I can get from local farms due to the difference in location and climate. So far, the variety has been different (made possible in part by having a number of farms as suppliers) and the volume has been similar to that of our full share; not quite what we expected! The fruit shares start this week, and I’m greatly looking forward to that; I’m hoping to see an overall cost savings in our budget as fruit is something that we normally purchase at the markets all through the summer. In terms of keeping up with the cooking, I’ve had more energy the past month or so, but my partner picked up the slack for the first six months of the year, and it wasn’t always pretty. We created very high-quality compost with the greens that just got away from us at times, and it took us a while to get back into a rhythm. We’ve been doing well lately, although meals have consisted largely of turkey burger (or chicken sausage) plus cooked vegetable plus raw vegetable plus lettuce (which I think we’ve probably seen the last of in this regional heat wave). Healthy, yes, but not particularly creative. At the moment, we have a stockpile of several varieties of sweet(ish) onions and many zucchini. We’re working our way through the zucchini (sautéed each night and made into muffins at least once a week), have a couple of eggplants waiting to be made into baba ghanoush, and I plan to make onion relish this week (tomorrow, if I can get organized early enough in the day). So far it’s early enough in the season that plain sliced cucumbers and tomatoes are still refreshing; soon we’ll likely need dressing and herbs and a variety of other flavors to spice them up. And, with the acquisition of our new chest freezer (another exciting event that went totally unremarked upon), we’ve frozen almost all the bunches of kale we’ve gotten this summer and will deal with them at some point in the future. Likely they’ll find their way into soup or lasagna or something else that can be prepared, frozen, and then reheated in the fall when we’re definitely going to be struggling to find time to eat, let alone cook.

With regard to the rest of the house, we’ve been working like mad people to create space for another human being. That’s entailed putting everything back into the basement post-repair and moving everything out of the shared office (into the attic, basement, or family room), which leaves us with a family room that is going to need some rearranging and redoing. It has also left us with an empty room, however; my partner has painted and installed a new light fixture, and we’re working on the next step of acquiring furniture and blinds (while the paper blinds from Home Depot have worked fine for us in the upstairs for four years now, I figure this is a good excuse to start getting real ones installed). We have been blessed with generous friends and bountiful thrift stores, so we are fairly well-stocked in the baby clothes department, at least in the sizes up to three months. Getting a dresser into the room will go a long way toward clearing some of the clutter in other parts of the house, where stacks of minuscule outfits are accumulating. Getting the bed will go a long way toward me not wondering where the heck we’re going to put an actual baby. At any rate, at the end of this preparatory process we hope to have new fans, working smoke detectors, and a much more organized house (out of necessity more than anything else; we’re not living in the largest space over here, although the family room addition goes a long way toward improving that).

Now that I’m simultaneously more energetic and stuck mostly inside because of the heat and smog, I expect to have at least a few more updates before the end of the summer. I may even fill you in on what we accomplished this spring, but don’t hold your breath.