Well, the peas are doing well! The spring/summer has been unusually cold with the lows in the upper 30’s to mid 40’s. Daytime temperatures have pretty much stayed in the low to mid 50’s except for the past couple days where the temperatures have ventured into the 60’s. My Siberian tomato plants are all but dead. The parsnips look as though they might make it. The beets, broccoli, turnips and rutabagas all look pathetic and the lettuce doesn’t look any better, either.

I still have kohlrabi to plant, as well as pok choy, Chinese cabbage, Swiss chard, and kale. I can’t remember every needing to plant vegetables so long into the summer. It is barely warm enough now as the soil is still very cold.

My husband’s fuchsias are also looking quite bedraggled. The strawberries are doing okay, but my four bleeding hearts are looking lovely. My blue poppies are way late in getting any blooms. My rose bushes are still bare of flowers, but that should change in the next week or so. The wild roses along the roads are blooming and just lovely. Other wild flowers such as the wild geranium and lupine are putting on a nice display, too.

That fire around Nenana was reported at over 105,000 acres a couple days ago. Since then, there has been another flare-up due to windy conditions. My youngest daughter and her family are in Fairbanks for soccer tournaments. The smoke has settled over the area a couple times this weekend. The girls’ teams finished well.

There is a buffalo roast in the rotisserie now. We’ll have some good vegetables to go with it, although I’m not sure which ones, yet. I’ll choose them when it’s a bit closer to the roast being finished. I may make a banana, walnut, spelt cake, too, because I have a bunch of ripe bananas and it’s been a while since I’ve baked a cake. It was fairly warm outside earlier, but now the temperature has cooled quite a bit, so the house won’t get too hot from the oven being on while baking the cake.

We are planning our next trek northward. My husband wants to see the fire damage to his old stomping grounds. He’s hoping there will be more of his old friends around this time. It’s between hunting, trapping and fishing so maybe he’ll have a better chance of visiting with them.

That’s about all from this neck of the woods. Till next time….