Texas = Hell in August.

It's hotter than a cockroach in a fry pan. And I mean that. The garden isn't panning out this year because it takes so much water and the fruit doesn't set unless it's 72 degrees or thereabouts overnight. I laid my plants down this year, freeing them from their cages and letting them sprawl. Now I'm getting tomatoes - not a huge amount, but definitely more than the tomatoes that had been caged, even though those are nearly nine feet tall. The cooled ground at night tends to lower the temperature for the blooms. It's about 76 to 79 degrees at its coolest at night, but that's the air temp. The water-cooled ground is closer to the temp where the fruit can set and that's what's been happening. Yay. Salsa.

A few weeks ago, I collected cacti tunas to make prickly pear wine and sugar-syrup for future margaritas. The tunas are abundant right now and I hadn't made wine in a while. I also found a recipe for peach wine that I'm trying out. A smaller batch, but the peaches were so cheap in the store that I couldn't resist. I just wish our own trees had fruited. The plum trees and all the front yard fruit trees didn't produce this year. It's the heat.

I fed the bees sugar syrup and need to do another batch this weekend. I don't think they're getting everything they need, even though the blooms are definitely still on the crepe myrtles and there are a lot of wildflowers that haven't completely died off. Nonetheless, I'm trying to keep them alive in this Texas hell, uh, I mean Texas heat.

The deck project continues. We pulled up a section of the main part (where we walk to and fro) last weekend and I was in charge of painting the boards - but the treated wood from home despot (yes, the 's' is intentional) is still a might wet with chemicals and the paint didn't want to stick to the boards. So we wait for them to cure a bit in the sun. I don't think Mike minds not doing it in the blistering heat that _is_ Texas.

We had more chicks die - one died in our arms (I think it was water deprivation or heat desperation), so we plucked it, gutted it (Mike's job) and ate it last night. I buried the other white chick that died. These are our meat birds for the year. We lost another laying hen to the heat, as well. Plenty of water, but some creatures just don't get it that they need more and don't drink.

I bought four Rio Grande turkeys (wild, but beautiful turkeys) for this and next year's consumption, as well. They happily chirp when I personally bring them grasshoppers from the garden. They are in a brooding box in the shade just outside the door on a table (the cats knocked the brooder box off the last construct we had, so we had to use a sturdier table).

As soon as we begin processing all the meat birds (either next week or the week after), we will put these birds in their place (after moving the chicken "tractor" - more like four walls built from scrap materials - to a different place so that the meat bird poop can replenish the grass).

We are also thinking about getting a whole 'nuther set of egg-laying hens and offing the ones we have. It's time to switch them out and I could use the chicken stock. That would be a good time to completely clean out the chicken coops and hose it down with bleach and water, after, of course, I remove the nitrogen-rich chicken poop and put it in my compost pile. This means I won't have eggs for a while - until the new birds are of age (they begin laying at about 5 months of age).

The piglets. Oh, the piglets. In my garden, eating my produce, getting on the deck (where they're not allowed!), eating the dog food, getting into trouble. Oh, the piglets. Mimi is a bit put out by them, now. She's no longer feeding them and she's getting her figure back - if that's what you want to call it.

Mike came up with a cool watering system for them (except the auto-fill bowl doesn't work... cheap crap, you know... gotta find a good one) and laid some pipe in the backyard out to where we re-located the camper shell and their pig sty - a mud bog that's shored on all sides so that we can water it and they can stay cool in this grueling heat. They don't like their feet to get hot and the ground on the farm right now is just that. So they cool off in their mud bog and it makes them happier. When I throw out corn for the goats in the barnyard, they are always on the other side of the fence wanting theirs. Mimi, too. We are still planning on offing one of the piglets and keeping the other -- but I am thinking now that we should off them both and find another companion for Mimi. Mmmm... more bacon!

Crap, it's late. Off to work!