Hello! It has been quite hot and humid here, with temperatures approaching ninety degrees. To cope, Nick and I have been trying to get the majority of our outdoor work done in the mornings, before the heat peaks. And there has been no shortage of work to do! Yesterday afternoon we bought a new bird feeder pole and baffle, and this morning my excellent husband installed them for me. We can now hang both feeders on the same pole and put a baffle on it, which we couldn't do with the old double-pole because it was too narrow to take a baffle and had an odd forked bottom. We also moved the feeders so that they are at least eight feet from other objects, to make it harder for the squirrels to climb them. We'll see how it goes. If this doesn't work I may very well borrow my neighbor's BB gun after all.
What was I doing while my terrific husband was digging and installing the new feeder pole, you ask? I was hard at work hauling wood around. The wood storage piece that Nick built last year had needed some tweaking, and once he was done adjusting it he decided we should relocated it to some more level ground in the backyard. Yesterday I deconstructed the two piles of wood next to the shed, and this morning I spent over an hour relocating the wood to the new location. Sadly, I am nowhere near done. I am however, sweat-drenched and exhausted, but felt better able to cope with the heat and humidity today than I did yesterday. 
Unfortunately, yesterday morning held a most unwelcome development. While looking over the garden, I discovered that the beautiful leaves of many of my beet plants had been absolutely ravaged since I had last looked at them a few days previously. Nick has been extremely busy indoors and had not had much time for the garden the first half of this week, so I was the first to notice. We've been battling slugs munching on our broccoli, eggplant kale and lettuce leaves, but this looked different. This looked like a disease. I spent a little while doing some online research and quickly discovered that we had a nasty case of Cercospora leaf spot, a fungus. It occurs when beets get too warm and wet. Nick has been very carefully not watering the leaves to try and prevent this type of problem, but we had rain and temperatures in the eighties for three days straight - there was nothing to be done. The bad news is that it's not really treatable except to pull all the affected leaves and spray everything with fungicide. Pulling all of the affected leaves basically meant pulling up every last Detroit Dark Red beet that we had. The Bull's Bloods aren't that badly affected, but they aren't growing much in the way of beets either. The Chioggia are halfway between the two; a fair number of affected leaves, but no so many that I had to pull up more than a couple of beets. The problem is that the fungus will overwinter in organic matter, and can affect other species as well - I found a couple of tiny spots on my Swiss Chard leaves. So we will have to be very careful when we till the soil in the bed, and we should not plant beets there next year. Some lines of beets are clearly more resistant than others, so perhaps next year we'll have better luck. In the meantime I've sprayed it all with a copper-based organic fungicide. On the (only) upside, we did have a delicious salad with beets, arugula, candied pecans and goat cheese last night... 
Our broccoli did not do well either. Between the hot temperatures and the slugs, only one or two plants appear to be surviving. We'll have to try again in the fall and remember to be more consistent with the organic slug bait. The zucchini and cucumbers are trying their hardest to make up for the failings of the other plants, as you can see here. Zucchini on the left, cucumber creeping in from the right. I think there's going to be a showdown...
Baby zucchinis! Baby cucumber!
The tomatoes are also doing quite well; in fact many of them have grown so tall that they have outgrown their original tomato cages, and Nick has had to improvise extending the cages upward with lightweight metal fencing. It appears to be working pretty well.
One last thing I did yesterday was finish the garden walkway. The pathways between the beds are lined with rock, and I finished extending the walkway out to the opening of the fencing, so that one can walk all through the garden without getting red clay all over one's shoes. It needs a little bit of touching-up but overall I am quite pleased. Nick asked me to put rock under the composter as well, to help with drainage of the compost tea* that leaks out. Hopefully it will keep the soil in that area a bit drier.
* = It's not really tea. By a long shot.
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