From the field: A cooler July week for my birthday

Hannah Alden, Reporter, The Record-Review This week, I celebrate my birthday and honor the last year during which I’ve grown and learned so much.

I’m not much for big birthday parties or hubbub, although I have enjoyed previous birthdays spent around a table with close company and good food. Next year will mark “big” birthdays for myself, Tyler, my mom and grandma, so we plan to have a combined bash to celebrate with a larger group.

As for this year, most of my birthday will be spent working, either on newspaper articles or farm duties. We got a brief shower at the farm on Monday night, but nothing substantial enough to take the burden off our irrigation. It was just enough rain to get the weeds going again and renew the pests. Flea beetles have resurged here recently, leading to damages on various crops like I’ve never seen before.

This is the time of year when the harvest starts to ramp up significantly. The first tomatoes are ripening. I gathered the first handful of fallen ground cherries earlier this week, which was a welcomed birthday treat. The first round of sweet corn has shot up significantly and some have tasseled. The zucchinis are growing at a faster rate and I’ve spotted the first winter squash forming on the vines. Thoughts about my birthday tend to get lost in the shuffle of peak farm season. It wasn’t until over the weekend that I remembered it was coming up. My birthday gift this year was a few new light fixtures with vintagestyle bulbs for in our kitchen. Tyler installed them over the weekend and once evening hit, we realized the shade of the lights created a red glow because of the color of our cabinets. We decided to give it a couple days to decide if we liked the look or not, eventually coming to the conclusion that it’s a little too spooky. So the bulbs will be replaced.

I’ve been enjoying the recent cooler weather, which makes farm work a little more pleasant. It’s a lot easier to get through a long to-do list when it’s breezy and in the 70s than when it’s 90 degrees and the humidity feels like a wall you’ve run into. Usually the time around my birthday offers that hot, stormy weather we often think of when we get to July, as was the case when I was born. My parents, with me as a newborn, spent the afternoon in the hallway of the hospital due to severe storm warnings.

I think my ideal birthday this year would be spent laying in the hammock reading a great book. Maybe I’ll get some time this weekend to do just that.