Discover Adventure with Weeks Outdoors

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Summer is finally here, but it came with a vengeance! 

We here in the northeast have had a hard time getting to the growing season this year, with well below normal temperatures and an overabundance of rain. We actually had our wood stove going just three weeks ago! People who already had crops in the ground were having to replace them because they were permanently stunted or got frost damage, and a lot of folks’ plants just out and out drowned! Some were replanting seeds, or re-strategizing where each crop would go, we were covering seedlings with pots, cups and covers, and we were tilling what most years would be our growing medium {soil}, with this year being soup! 

Thankfully most all my growing is done in raised beds. Our beds are three feet high with excellent drainage, and the beds tend to warm up sooner than the ground gardens do, so we felt that we were in “ok” shape. 

Then we began a steady, although slight, daily rise in temperatures until we arrived at a more conducive climate for starting our summer transplants, but even then it was still cool and quite wet.  

Then this past weekend arrived and everything went south, like the temperatures south of the Mason/Dixon line! {I don’t know how you southerners do it}. Sunday came in at 94, yesterday was 97 and today will top out at around 100 degrees, or higher! Unfortunately, tomorrow will be upwards of 93 Too! Our first official heat wave…. Yuk! 

Now, we New Englanders expect this kind of weather every summer, you know, the ones without much acclimation time. We usually go from the mid to upper seventies, with a week or two of eighties after that, and then… BAM!, it’s upper eighties and nineties! It’s summer and everything is hot and sticky! It’s another year where it seems like we went straight from winter to summer. But we are used to it. We get it every year, and it’s how we roll. Most of us feel blessed with what a lot of us consider the best weather in the country. We get all four seasons, hurricanes {when we get them} that are “usually” quite tame by the time they reach us up here, tornadoes are almost non-existent, and when we do get them, they’re never more than an EF2, mostly EF1’s. But we still complain. It’s who we are. It’s in our DNA. We are New Englanders….Cranky Yankees.