We've been staying cool on these hot days by keeping the windows open at night & shutting them in the morning before the temptature outside warms up, trapping in the cool air. Thankfully the house is well insulated & stays fairly cool-in the late afternoon, just when it starts to warm up inside it's beginning to cool down outside & the windows are opened up again! We have a couple of small battery fans that we can run at night-the O2Cool Fan runs off of D batteries & comes with an adaptor so we can plug them in when we turn on the generator. For now we run our generator in the early mornings to juice, do a couple loads of laundry, charge up the computer & the battery for the screw gun ( that also powers a light) & run the well pump. Our water tank is 20 feet or so above the house on a hill in the woods & gravity flows to the house- there's plenty of pressure!
The spot where our house was moved had been overgrown with poison ivy for years so Mom found this amazing recipe to eradicate it & has been faithfully spraying the noxious weed every time she sees it sprouting up!
Poison Ivy Spray
1 gallon of white vinegar
1 cup of salt
2 tablespoons liquid dish soap
Mix the salt into the vinegar until it dissolves, then slowly stir in the dish soap. Pour into a sprayer. This works even better if you spray the poison ivy while the sun is out! It may take several applications over time- it is a battle, killing poison ivy, but this is a good natural recipe!
Our garden was a field for years with clay soil and a verity of weeds,a few good and a few not so good!
We built raised beds for early crops-the potatoes, cabbage, other herbs and flowers we planted in the ground then surrounded with cardboard & mulched with hay.
In the part of the garden that we didn't plant in veggies, we sowed a cover crop of buckwheat! It works wonders for keeping weeds down and it reseeds nicely, when we turn it back unto the soil it will feed the new garden spot with wonderful nutrients, it looks beautiful &
our honey bees love the blooms.
Hope y'all enjoy these pictures!
The West Ladies