My brain just melted and slid out my ear
The heat wave must have brought a new crop of bugs with it, because my garden is being decimated. Bean plants turning into lace again, and something taking bites out of and then turning the leaves of the peppers rusty brown. Then their leaves are all falling off. Cucumber vines turning brown and shriveling up one leaf at a time. Then last night I noticed that every last one of my tomatoes has blossom end rot. The powdery mildew is taking over the squash just as I suspected it would.
And of course, I’m leaving to visit my family back east in a few days, so whatever corrections I try to make before I go will likely need repeating while I’m gone. So that won’t happen.
I’m just going to quit making contingency plans in my head, and finally accept the message the garden is giving loud and clear: the market will not be happening this year. I know I have enough other things to do, but it’s still a disappointment. I like to think I can manage it all, but I can’t.
So! I’m going to enjoy whatever the garden brings forth, which right now is beans by the five pound bucket, chard, beet greens (and beets are forming,) and whatever little bit of Nero di Toscana Kale the rat bastard runny babbit has left in the sea of munched down stems. We had our first Eight Ball Zucchini, and the crooknecks are setting fruit like crazy. Maybe we’ll get to enjoy ratatouille before the mildew kills off the squash plants. The Vermont Cranberry beans are starting to climb their trellises and I’ll be tossing a bunch of peppery nasturtiums into our salad tonight.
The temperature is supposed to break tomorrow, bringing some thunderstorms and rain, and nighttime temps back in the 60s. Last night it was 78, and the air conditioner doesn’t cool off the upstairs worth a bean because the attic isn’t properly vented. We’re sleeping horribly, so I got up and put the fan back in the window and let it blow the warm wet air over us because at least it circulated a little bit of oxygen. Sort of. I need to change the sheets again (3rd time in five days) because we lay there sweating buckets and cursing into the night.
Is it winter yet?
Technorati Tags: heat wave, disappointment, garden
"In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy."
~Henry David Thoreau
August 2nd, 2006 at 5:51 pm
we’re battling things out with our air conditioner guy, trying to get him to fix our attic air conditioning properly before the end of summer, too, so i feel for you.
stick it out, it’ll be winter before you know it!
August 3rd, 2006 at 12:25 pm
amen.
August 3rd, 2006 at 5:27 pm
You know how much I LOVE hot weather. I’m so sorry to hear yours lasted longer than ours! And I really empathise about the bad action going on in the garden. Blossom end rot is so discouraging-but I’m glad you’ve got lots of beans coming in.
I know, that’s not much comfort.
August 14th, 2006 at 7:28 am
And the worse thing will be if that neighbor that said you planted the tomatos too close together says “I told you so!” hee hee!