Did some knitting and took a nap, and now I just came in from the beastly heat of the back yard and doing a little puttering. The fire ants in the garden area appear to be dead. I don’t really know until morning when it’s cool enough for them to all be up near the surface, but I was chopping around in Bed One with my hand hoe working in some fertilizer, and I didn’t see a single ant. Having to use poison directly in the garden beds doesn’t make me at all happy, but I will be pleased if the fire ants are either dead or have moved elsewhere.

Bed One is now completely ready to be planted in again, but in this heat, there’s really no sense planting anything. Now all I can do is wait to see what August brings. I’m not as worried about getting an early start on the next season, because it’s very easy to protect plants from the cold of what we call winter in Central Texas. Protecting them from outrageous heat is just about impossible. So unlike the jump start I squeezed in for the spring and summer plants (to get something before the heat set in), I can afford to wait a little while to get the fall and winter stuff going.

Bed Two is almost all dead. I’ve been watering and pampering the plants as much as ever, but when the very dirt they are growing in is 100ºF even when damp and under heavy mulching, there’s just not much to be done about it. I was going to try to save some of those plants for the fall garden, but now I think I should just go ahead and yank them all out too and prep that bed completely as well. I’ll start a few tomato seeds indoors –the pear tomatoes, which seem to be the hardiest– and transplant them out when the whether cools off some. I won’t be planting a whole bed of tomatoes for fall anyway. If we get tomatoes great. If not, well, we live without or buy one at the store when we just can’t resist having something red and tomato-like in the salad.

Maybe I’ll work on Bed Two tomorrow and finally pull up the pole beans. It’s going to be depressing work. I hate pulling plants up. It’s necessary, of course, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Pulling up the beans in particular is going to hurt, because while they only produced enough beans to restock my seed supply, the plants themselves are lovely. They are so lovely, they even make my ridiculous bamboo trellis look cute. I guess I’ll take a bunch of photos before I ripped them from the ground so I can look at them whenever I want. Next spring, I think I’ll move the two large planters to the front porch, reinstall my string trellis, and plant some pole beans up there just for the look of them. I miss having a bunch of plants on my front porch.

Now that I have frittered away most of my day with napping, knitting, and garden puttering, I suppose I should go do the pesky dishes and start planning dinner. I don’t feel like doing any of that, but even when taking a week to goof off as much as possible and have some mental health time, there are still some things like eating and washing up that are completely unavoidable.