The farm in the heat of summer!

Seattle has record highs forecast all week. It's pretty amazing actually. This story explains why.
I refuse, though, to complain. I just need to remind myself of the cold rain, the mud that one needs to trudge through day in and day out when working on a farm in PNW in March. No, I'll take this heat any day!!! Here is how the farm is LOVING it or how some are staying cool.

My favorite thing to grow in the garden, green beans!! This year we have LOTS of plants. They are about a month ahead of last year and I am thrilled!! If you look closely you can see the tiny beans forming. The plants are covered in them and with this heat I anticipate we'll be picking beans by the weekend or very shortly thereafter.

I took this picture looking straight ahead at the corn! Corn loves heat! They are taller than I am now! A year ago on July 12th they were only maybe 6 inches high or so and we didn't get any. We hope for bountiful blessings this year. James counted 50 stalks. We probably could quadruple that for our family of 6 but we don't have room.

Summer squash in full bloom with a few ready to pick. I have 2 of these plants called "super pik" and I hope we'll get to pick a lot!

Zucchini loves heat at well and is going to town. I just love these squash plants. All the varieties. They are so majestic looking!

Here are 2 of my volunteer tomato plants. Full of blooms and loving the heat. I pretty much gave up on tomatoes for preserving so I only have a few plants just for fun and eating at the summer dinner table but I tell you what, these are the best plants I've produced yet. I have 8 plants of various kinds in pots and several volunteers in the garden that I've let go. They all look awesome!

Here we have the animals trying to stay cool. The barnyard where the goats are is continually under shade so they just dig some dirt away to cool earth and lay there.
The chickens, below, hide in this one little corner until relief comes. As the sun moves across the sky their shade gets bigger.

And last but not least, the human animals on the farm cool off in this manner.

I just hope and pray that this blessing of sun and heat sticks around for another month. Oh yeah, don't get all uptight you PNWers who hate. I could stand for 20 degrees cooler than today's 101.2 registered at the nearest weather station to our house (about 2 miles up the road).
I just don't want another blog post like this one in late August of last year titled "Mud, garden and eggs". No, I'm not ready for the heat of the summer to be over and I surely am not looking forward to fall and all the rain that comes with it.