Farmer's almanac
Last week's screaming news was that the record temperature in Furnace Creek, Death Valley, was almost, just about, perhaps set to be broken. The fact that it didn't come close to happening was somehow not reported.
Furnace Creek presents the climate porn people with a difficult conundrum. A thermometer reading is just that – a simple reading. Unlike the evaluation of atmospheric temperatures, which depends on merging and adjusting a whole number of different readings, readings from one or two thermometers in a fixed place are hard to fudge. Here are the temperatures for the last week or so, and the forecast for the next week in Furnace Creek. If nothing else, you can conclude that it comes by its name honestly. Last week's high of 125° F (52°C) is still 9°F short of the record.
Our temperatures have mostly been in the 70s. We have yet to break 90°. Absolutely delightful to everybody except the climate alarmists.
Two nights ago, Grandmother Nadia dragooned me into spading up the garlic harvest. After a couple of days' rain, she was worried it would rot in the ground. She showed me where to put the spade and I brought the garlic up where she could get her hands on it. To me the garden is just a welter of strawberries, dill and onions. I would have overlooked the dry stalks of the garlic, but she knew exactly where to go. I clumsily explained that the last farmer in my family tree died in 1875.
We had ample crops of strawberries and cherries. We can still buy them in the store, but ours are gone. We are bringing in bucket loads of apples, cucumbers and zucchini. I have the second jar of pickles curing. Grandpa Sasha is at work cutting up the apples to be dried in the sun. Next winter they will provide us with a delicious compote. We will continue to have apples from now through November.
It takes work to find the raspberries on the vine, but it is worth the work. Especially if the children do it. Same with the currents (not pictured) – we had a bumper crop of them as well. Eddie made some current jam.
Still to come are tomatoes, of which we have a huge abundance. I am sure I will make enough sauce to last through the winter.
We likewise have a great many grapes, but we never make much use of them. We do use the leaves to make dolmas. The first batch was for a party on June 17. The second batch went straight to the freezer – they provide a balanced and filling meal that is quick to heat in the microwave. We should get out and pick some more leaves before they get too tough.
The peaches and some of the apricots seem to have survived leaf curl. They will ripen next month. The sour cherry plums appear to be as abundant as ever. My major use for them is to make my apple pies appropriately tart, though they are also good for making jam.
We will have an abundance of walnuts – we are still working on those we harvested last year.
Vegetable gardens have proven essential to Ukrainian survival through the crises that seem to come up every couple of decades. What with Covid, the war and food price inflation we have been taking ours more seriously.
Our wildlife comes and goes. We hear fewer cuckoos in our neighborhood every year, probably because of the heavy construction of our new subway/highway and the replacement of summer houses with single-family dwellings. On the other hand, we have more hedgehogs than ever. A family of five visits the cat bowl on our back porch periodically just about dusk. The children showed up daily to admire a pigeon who just raised her family on our second-floor balcony. The job must be done – a couple of days ago we saw her shooing a young one out of the nest and into a tree.
A subscriber is twitting me to define “woke.” Apparently Ron DeSantis has made that attempt. I see no need, as everybody seems to have a good intuitive idea. Like Potter Stewart, who said about pornography. “I know it when I see it.” Everybody, except those who strongly don’t want to acknowledge its existence, knows what “woke” is
That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where for the kids the summer never ends but for the adults it seems incredibly fleeting. Soon they will be on to new adventures. Zoriana in school, and Eddie in a real, serious school for the first time. Meanwhile, glad they are enjoying their freedom.
Glad you are enjoying an abundance of nature's gifts. Nice.
Bo and Ben Winegard usefully defined “woke” several years ago, long before it was used in mainstream broadcasts like Fox News, as the dogmatic view that individuals and groups have the same basic capacities, so that only oppression, discrimination, or lack of opportunity can explain disparities in outcome. The most salient cases being the denial of race and sex differences.
Basically all of academia and journalism, the core of the modern American cathedral, is based on a religious commitment to outcome equality, and the corresponding assumption that injustice is so pervasive that it’s now called “implicit” bias and “systemic” racism, which they say can exist without anyone actually being biased or racist.