Summer 2025 here we are! It’s way past time for me to write a personal update, so here we go!
I’ll start with the yard here in PA. Our property is larger here and has plenty of mature plantings, but there is also enough space for us to put in our own plantings and put in the raised beds. I’ve put in four crepe myrtles, a yew, two hollies, two clematis plants, one for each trellis, and three butterfly bushes. They are all small now, but in few years they will all be bigger than you might expect. It’s all a process. It takes about forty minutes to an hour to cut the grass and maybe a half hour to an hour to trim and pull weeds. I really have to keep on top of things here as everything grows faster and more fully!
We’ve had a tremendous amount of rain this year. The lawn is very lush! It is a mix of about eight plants including several grasses and clover. The temps have been very nice so far and we have had enough sun that nothing has suffered too much. Most things are where I would expect them to be growth wise, but out potato bed is growing much faster than I expected! See slideshow below. The annuals are a little behind, but that’s mainly because of the smaller amount of sunny days.
Three of the nine raised beds we have, we are keeping soil free, for woody stalks and logs and we’ll fill them in next year in the spring. Too much still to be cut back and we have the space in those soil-less raised beds. We haven’t chosen all the border stones we want for the new in ground flower bed yet, but I will start by using the remaining stone that we didn’t use for the new stonework facade out front, to start that project. The new walkways will also need to wait until next year.
Snakes are much more common here. Thankfully most are non-poisonous and are garden helpers. We have several garter snakes living in the yard and we have a black racer that lives in the back rock wall.
We have a crazily diverse number of birds in the area! Just sitting in our yard on any given day I must see twenty different types of birds, and I’m not even trying! Eagles, hawks, geese, pigeons, crows, ducks, and every songbird I can think of. The music they produce most mornings is delightful!. I think being in a valley next to a large river, being a more temperate climate, and our area being full of established neighborhoods with lots of different insects and plant types helps.
It’s about to heat up with a series of extremely hot and humid days. I can’t say I’m looking forward to that. I haven’t had to water much at all, but I expect I’ll need to for the rest of the growing season until we get to autumn. I’ll need to start to do all my work outside in the early morning and be finished by the time the sun starts ascending into peak position overhead. With the increased severe heat and humidity during summer here I’ll need to be very careful not to overwork myself and keep to shade later in the day, to keep my migraines at bay and to reduce severity if I do get one.
Stan has started to bring our house plants and they have fared well in traveling. So far, I have eight of our plants and I’ve purchased a few as well. We’ve also received one spider plant as a gift and that had a baby, so I planted it and it took well to soil, as they always do. He’ll bring more houseplants when he comes in July.
Stan is also cloning several of our outdoor plants in NH with root ball capsules. It’s our first try at this, so we’ll have to see how successful we are. I want a clone of our mountain ash; they are very hard to get here in PA. Our orange azalea, two of our of rhododendrons, and our beautiful pink honeysuckle are others he is going to clone so I can have them here in PA.
Having the new dual heat pump system in the house has been wonderful! Not only does it heat well, but now we have universal AC in the entire downstairs. Upstairs we’ll still use the baseboard heat when we are up there and to cool down rooms we have good, portable AC units. It’s just my office, my studio, Stan’s office, and the guest room up there, so it isn’t like we are up there more than a third of any given day, if that, when we do use one of those rooms.
I have chosen my stylist here, our new dentist, and I have an appointment to establish care with a primary care physician here in August. We’ve also chosen our new eye care provider, though I don’t need to make that appointment quite yet. Walking into Pittston from our house is a wonderful walk. Lots of different architectural styles and lots of plant life and flower gardens to pass on the way. The art scene here is wonderful! I’m going to save that for another post, but you can take a look at the mural on the side of the building that my stylist is in above and also take a look at the Pittston Art Loop Trail below.
All the early paperwork and permits are now in place for incoming the solar array! We have a tentative install date the week of July 20th, but that can change with weather problems. The install should be early enough that we can mitigate some of the increased costs of cooling this place in summer. Next year we should be able to bank some of our solar. The array is twenty-nine high quality panels. They are estimating that we can cover 80% of our electric needs, but that’s what our solar installer told us in NH and we were able to erase our bill. This house is MUCH more energy efficient, as are the appliances, so I think we’ll be able to wipe out the bill here as well. We’ll see!
Next post will be a B&Q post. Happy summer!
