Heat wave

Very quick post tonight because I need to get to bed. We have been getting up at 5 a.m. in an attempt to get our morning chores done before the temperatures climb too horribly high. It's around 72 when we wake up, but it's into the mid-80s by 8 a.m. when we get inside. No, we don't normally have three hours of chores to do first thing in the morning. We don't actually make it outside until about 6 a.m., then we've been trying to do stuff that would normally be done through the day, such as weeding the garden. Today, most of our time was spent cleaning the barn, so we could get garbage out. Still we somehow managed to miss some old eggs. They apparently busted during the day, and it stinks in there! Temperatures in the barn exceeded 100 the past few days. All the animals are outside except for the baby chicks, who are surviving in the heat. They are certainly NOT huddling together, so I don't have to worry about them suffocating each other! I make sure they have plenty of water. Of course, we have to make sure all the animals have plenty of water in this heat, or they could die. Outside temperatures are staying in the 90s until about an hour before sunset, which makes evening chores problematic.

Yesterday, we picked peaches in the morning also. Then in the afternoon, we canned peach preserves and peach butter. I've never had peach butter before, but it is delicious! We barely made a dent in the peaches, so we plan to make more peach butter tomorrow. This afternoon, my indoor job was making cheese.

Still no tomatoes, but we are getting quite a few banana peppers. I'll have enough of those to can soon. I have no idea what happened to my zucchini. It was doing so beautifully, and then the leaves started to turn brown, and it's dieing.

Time to get to bed now!