June is Brought to You by the Letter P

June at the Molette House involved some highs and lows, each of which begins with the letter P: purple martins and the pump house—enjoying the purple martins and agonizing over the pump house!

Having tried to attract purple martins for three years now, we were thrilled to discover a colony has now made its warm season home at the Molette House. Therefore, we now have dozens, if not hundreds, of new neighbors.

They are beautiful, deep purple large swallows that winter in Brazil and summer in the US. They are very social creatures, have a beautiful song, and work hard all day long at eating flying insects, of which we have an abundance!

During the day we would see them constantly circling the house and flying over the field, patrolling for insects. They will eat any flying insect that is relatively high off the ground, including wasps. We have historically had a major problem with wasps, and constantly battle them around the house, but did not see a single wasp in June!

The common wisdom is that purple martins also eat mosquitoes, but if you read the research on them it states that they eat few, if any mosquitos, because the mosquitoes fly too low and are not necessarily out during the daylight, when martins are active. In any event, we have seen far fewer mosquitos this year than normal, so we aren’t complaining! David is fascinated with the martins and loves to sit on the porch and watch their aerial acrobatics. (It’s also a good way for him to get out of a lot of hard work. 😊)

Relative to the pump house, the interior wood was all ruined by the flooding when the pipes burst during the extreme cold we had in January (which is hard to imagine now with the stifling heat).

The walls are wooden and many of them warped and buckled, so we decided to replace them. Tripp, our contractor, came down and looked at what is needed, and we decided to go with plywood and batten strips. We had individual boards previously, but that was primarily because we had them left over from the main house. It is not necessary to go to that expense for the interior of a pump house, so we went with something more economical but attractive.

To help the process along, we spent an entire day cleaning out everything from the pump house, which we also use as a storage house and tool room. It was hard work but helped speed along the process of Tripp and his crew being able to do their work. It is not a sexy project, but it helps get a lot of things out of the main house, so we can continue working on it in preparation for our open house in March.

We had a few visitors to the house in June, including some colleagues from a group that helps support nearby Old Cahawba, Menzo Driskell and Cecil Williamson. We loved having them over and showing them the house but made them promise to come back in the spring when we hope to have everything finished!

We are anxiously awaiting progress reports from our furniture maker, Marty Weck, on the restoration of the original Molette bed, as well as the construction of a farm table from remnants of heart pine from the house. We don’t have any updates this time but will let you know as soon as we know something.

June was a month of slow but steady progress, with the highlights being welcoming dozens of winged workers to the Molette House team and also getting the pump house whipped back into shape!