Friday, August 21, 2009

Dog Days of August


Summer was late arriving, but when the heat wave hit last week it was as if there had never been rain. With a full week of 30plus temps and 100% humidity just ended, even the prospect of hurricane rain on Sunday sounds (almost) welcome. It felt like we'd been transported to the tropics for a while, though some of the garden responded by putting on rapid growth.

The first blackberries are delicious, plumped up by the rain and ripened by a week of sun (probably thought they were in Tuscany). Hummingbirds hover around the scarlet runner flowers when I'm picking the pole beans that grow overnight from tiny to "pick me now!!" size. Bees are delighted with the snow white borage blossoms, bright coloured snapdragons, and soft pink bee balm. I am delighted with the rose pink zinnias and (finally!!) reddening fruit on the cherry tomato plants.
Wet weather gave fungal infections a head start and it's a race between getting tomatoes ripened before the blight affecting much of the leaves takes them out. I've been cutting off yellowing, spotty leaves as fast as I can, but the problem is worse than usual this year.

I've had cedar waxwings, robins, crows, goldfinches, warblers, hummingbirds and a variety of butterflies around for the last month or so - painted lady & fritillaries most common of the butterflies. They enjoyed the milkweed, but almost no monarchs around, hope it's not a bad sign. Last year I had several monarch caterpillars and none this time around. It's done blooming now and the Autumn Joy sedum is just starting to turn blush pink at the tips, still mostly a soft spring green. Crickets have been noisy the last few nights, and I have a small garter snake who persists in wiggling into the crack of the cellar door. I have to check every time I close it for fear of squashing him.

It's not a good year for arachnaphobes - spiders everywhere. Every time I open the side door I have to brush away cobwebs or duck under them to miss the striped legged humbugs. At my sister's home there are gigantic spiders in the screen porch, amazing sized creatures. It's good to have them about to keep pests down, but they just aren't pretty. Fun to observe just the same.

I stayed up late watching for the Perseid meteor showers from my doorstep, got a few mosquito bites for the effort but did see one lovely silvery meteorite streaming across the sky. (I forgot to watch the first night & the second has a lot fewer.)

Here we are already wrapping up another summer and school opens again in a couple of weeks. The teens around here spent a lot of our hot days swimming in an outdoor lake that has a newly installed pontoon, which my son & his friends really appreciate. He's become a big fan of the German band Rammstein, so I'm hearing a lot of "industrial"rock. Sounds very dramatic and has a heavy beat, kind of catchy when you're in the right mood, interesting lyrics (in translation.)

Best book this month - The Savage Garden by Mark Mills, a good summer story, set in a villa near Florence, with a mystery of long ago alongside a more recent murder to solve, and the garden is almost like a character. Now reading an interesting history of honey and bees -Robbing the Bees by Holley Bishop.

Nine years this summer since my oldest son died, and this year again rosemary and moss roses are planted in his memory. Many of Millay's poems bring him to mind, like this one:


You go no more on your exultant feet
Up paths that only mist and morning knew;
Or watch the wind, or listen to the beat
Of a bird's wings too high in air to view, --
But you were something more than young and sweet
And fair,--and the long year remembers you.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay








No comments: