The unofficial start of summer

Hannah Alden, Reporter, The Record-Review Hot weather has arrived just in time for Memorial Day weekend, which seems to be the unofficial start to summer for many people.

I’m not sure if there’s ever been a Memorial Day weekend during my life that I didn’t spend up north at our family’s cabin. Most years we have gotten lucky with the weather and the trip is made up of mostly hours spent at the lake. Our family’s property is within walking distance of a small, private lake with such clear water — it’s a real gem of a place.

For the past decade or so, the lake’s water has been rising rapidly, removing the beach area where we’d all hang out. The higher water hasn’t stopped us from enjoying it — we usually either just float in tubes near shore or accept the fact that if you sit in a chair you’ll be wet. The years of rising shore line were necessary for the health of the lake, which was drying up in years of drought when I was a kid.

My parents, who now live permanently in a house up the road from the cabin, have reported that the water level has dropped a bit this spring, creating about six feet of beach. Maybe one day there will be enough room for the next generation of kiddos in our family to make sand castles again. I stop myself from complaining about the water level, as I know it’s simply the ebbs and flows of nature at work.

I’m hoping to get up to the cabin this weekend, but now with the farm, I have more to worry about while we’re away. With the hot temperatures and no significant rain forecasted, I’m having to figure out how to manage getting the plants enough water. We don’t yet have an irrigation system, so it’s a bit of an ongoing ordeal with lots of hoses involved.

I’ve yet to plant out my warm weather crops, like peppers, tomatoes and squash. Since they are still in pots, they dry out quickly in weather like this. Unfortunately with a potential frost in the forecast later this week, I don’t know if I’ll have time to plant them all before the holiday weekend. I may be making a trip back home in the middle of the weekend to give everything a good watering.

Over the weekend while planting, I was surprised to find that the farm’s soil has stayed moist and cool just under the surface, even with the dry weather we’ve had. That’s one benefit to having a heavier soil type.