Wow, that's a big change. The buyers will be getting some nice gardens and your family will be getting some nice heat relief I hope! Is this a permanent move back to VA?
It is, Lord willing, a permanent move back to Virginia. My mom owns a ten-acre property in central Virginia, and we are currently living with her in her house. We are in the process of getting a permit to build a second house on the land where my husband and kids and I will live when it’s finished. We’ll still be next door to Grandma that way, but we won’t be quite so underfoot as we are now.
We are looking forward to cooler temperatures here than in Texas. Last night, however, was ironically quite hot in the house. My mother does not have central air conditioning, though she does have a wall unit in her living room. The cool does not spread well throughout the house. It was in the mid eighties inside last night. Usually it cools off outside at night, though, but last night there was smoke in the air again, so we couldn’t open up the windows. [I’m not sure if it was Canadian wildfire smoke this time or if there was different source.]. Thankfully a storm came through and gave us three tenths of an inch of rain and cooled things down to sixty nine. When it started raining, I figured the smoke was washed out of the air, and I opened up. From our Texas days we own three of Midea’s U-shaped window air conditioners that should be arriving soon on with our household goods, and we’re looking forward to installing them in the warmer rooms here. They’re quite energy efficient and have a separate dehumidify function.
My mom has gardened here for fifty years. She has cut back in recent years but still grows an abundance of food. This year, in the hope that we’d be moving up this summer, she planted more than usual. It has been dry here, and she’s been having some problems with plants being eaten off inside her garden fence, so she actually believes that she doesn’t have a good garden. It might not be up to her usual standards, but it’s really quite amazing. She let me take pictures, though, so I’ll start posting some here.
The first picture is a salad I ate at lunch yesterday. The lettuce and parsley came from my mom’s garden, but the tomato is one we brought up from Texas when we drove this week. I had wanted to save seeds from this variety. It’s a Taiga that doesn’t ripen to red and produces a very meaty heart-shaped tomato. I thought the salad was an example of what a good gardening team I hope my mom and I will be. That’s her parsley patch in her garden.
Here’s one of her clumps of rhubarb. She has several around the edges of her garden. They probably need to be divided, but right now we’ll just leave them alone. My mom froze numerous pints of chopped rhubarb this spring.
This cabbage plant has already had the main head harvested, and its growing side shoots just the way that broccoli does. I’ve grown cabbage before but didn’t realize that it did that.
My mom isn’t super pleased with her corn this year, but it looked great to me and my kids. Their first reaction was to stand next to it, look at the tops over their heads, and say, “I think she’s got ‘knee-high by the Fourth of July’ covered.”
I’m going to miss my raised beds and my arches trellises, but it will be fun to have a gardening partner and some really good soil.
