HeronDragonWrites: Summer Came!

Unknown beauties from the Evil Store (OSJL) - they always have stuff you didn't know you needed 'til you get there, and you exit with a car-load of stuff. Always. No matter what you went for. And it's almost always stuff you're glad to have!

We’ve kind of skidded over into summer as the solstice kicked in, from weather that really was more like early spring. We went from 36-40-degree nights and 60-degree-or-less days, to 70-degree nights and 80+-degree days – and humid – over less than a week. Last night I made the Husband put the air conditioner in my bedroom window, and got a decent night’s sleep for the first time in a few days. No fresh air, but the fresh air is heavy and wet, so I don’t really care so much. And it cuts out the noise from the idiots who think 7 am is a good time to use the chainsaw, or take down an old shed.

Potato flowers

The weather’s having a crabby effect on most of us northern New Englanders – if you aren’t crabbing about the current weather, it’s a fair guess you aren’t originally from here. I know a few ex-Central and South Americans who are saying, “What! The weather has just finally gotten comfortable!” but what do they know? I tried explaining to one nice lady that when it’s hot, and especially when it’s hot and humid, first I get cranky, then I get angry, then I get a headache, then I get sick to my stomach, and then I turn into a fire-breathing dragon…and she just sort of looked confused. “But it’s summer – summer is really nice!”

Yeah, it’s nice, except when it isn’t.

Peony bounty this year!

And let’s talk about mosquitoes, and ticks, and blackflies, which have all been out in endless hoardes, all at once this year, along with the no-see-ums (which I can’t usually see so I don’t know how many there are of them), and they all seem to be especially hungry and toxic. Someone I was talking to the other day told about sitting on a relative’s porch, and watching lines of ticks walking across the flagstones. That story kept me itching for hours.

The other things that keep me itching late into the night are the dozens of swollen, itchy bites covering my legs and arms that are, unusually, swollen and itchy for days, and taking forever to heal up this year.

Broccoli flower

After I found a tick waiting for me on my pillow when I went to bed one night, the cats have been forbidden access to the upstairs, which doesn’t make them happy. They both have pretty thick fur, so it’s not often I find a tick attached to them, and they get the monthly goop that causes any tick that bites them to die; but they’re excellent tick buses and we spend a lot of time daily sitting with them or carrying them around, so the ticks are more than happy for a ride to a nice, tasty human. So far we haven’t had one attach to us – as far as we know – but with all the diseases the ticks carry nowadays, every little sensation presents itself in the brain as a tick crawling on skin, and we spend hours at night checking, checking, checking. I haven’t been in the woods for years because I just-can’t-cope, and using a fan for cooling is an exercise in feeling armies of imaginary ticks crawling across the skin.

Even in the garden, even with all the paved paths I’ve been making, tickiness is problematic. I can’t even run out for a handful of herbs while I’m making supper without doing a tick check before going back indoors.

Thai and sweet basils in a pot

Speaking of all the pavers I’ve installed in the past two years, the garden does seem to love them, and it does cut down some of the weeding. I live in a cold pocket in the middle of the snow belt, and where there are paths of pavers, the beds warm up faster, things grow bigger faster, and there are also lots of spiders. Spiders eat bugs – go, Spiders! Some days (only maybe three so far this year) I can walk across the pavers in the late-day sun, watch the spiders scurry away ahead of me, see the flower borders overflowing onto the pavers, and imagine I’m walking in a Mediteranean garden instead of a cold, windy New Hampsha attempt at a garden. Especially when I come to a spot where the thyme – which has taken over most of the field – is long and draping itself around the rock-like chunks. It’s kinda magical.

New path, between the raspberries and the peas

Thyme in the field

And speaking of the herbs, I’ve been bringing my excess to the local café and the café in my office building for several weeks now, and it makes me happy that the trimmings get used instead of being composted. I haven’t planted dill in years – it’s almost invasive, it self-seeds so readily, and at this time of year I have lots and lots and lots of plants that are all dillweed that need thinning out in places and removing completely in others. I also have a field full of thyme, which in spots grows tall enough to cut; a giant sage plant; way too much marjoram, which is the product of a single plant I put at one end of the garden years ago, that moved itself to the back fence and is constantly threatening to overwhelm everything growing around it. I told it to spread into the field with the thyme and it’ll be mostly unmolested. In spring and fall I have regular and garlic chives. Catman takes care of the catnip, but I have French tarragon, which is a perennial, summer savory, which is a reseeding annual, and this year I put in an annual lemon verbena and a couple of bronze fennel plants to play with. And there are three kinds of mint, and bee balm. I grow basil, too, but there is never enough basil to share. Is it possible to grow too much basil? It’s a perennial question, and one to which I’ve never found a positive answer. This year the basil and the Thai basil are growing in pots I placed on the pavers nearest the kitchen wart – so far, so good. I also have cilantro, which mostly arises from self-seeding plants I grew years ago, though I added some seed this year; and I always put in some parsley. This year I’m growing it from seed instead of buying a couple of plants, and it’s taking an unbearably long time to grow to pickable size.

One patch of self-seeded dill

But the garden is starting to look good, in spite of the weird weather we’ve had. The clematis was gorgeous; the peonies are better than they’ve maybe ever been. For the first time ever, I was able to grow decent lettuce, and the garlic I planted last fall actually grew – I picked scapes this evening, which is the very, very delicious long, curling stem the garlic puts out with a flower bud on the end. Leeks and onions and shallots and Egyptian onions are all looking really good; the California poppies are in full brilliant bloom; the alliums I planted last fall pretty much all bloomed, and the drumstick allium are making buds now. Johnny-jump-ups spread themselves happily around, squashes are getting bigger, and the pepper plants and tomatoes, while still short and stunted-looking, are blooming…I hope they get bigger or I’ll be picking miniature fruits off them. All my beans are up, my peas are flowering, the carrots need thinning, the parsnips are up, the beets are coming, and even the corn experiment in the field might be fruitful – I planted eight hills, with squash on the sides, and the earliest four plus the squashes have germinated and are ankle-high.

The corn-and-squash experiment, in the field behind the back fence. Cloches cover newer plantings.

Now is the bending-over-and-yanking-stuff time in the garden: thinning carrots and eventually beets, pulling weeds, thinning parsnips, pulling weeds, pulling weeds, and, oh yeah – pulling weeds. There’s enough time to do some manuring and mulching, for fertilizing the new raspberries and the old raspberries and blueberries and peach trees, for piling up wood chips as mulch around the fruit trees, and for standing and just looking with amazement at the beautiful spread of blooming wildflowers in the back forty. So much is blooming now – devil’s paintbrush, wild forget-me-nots, daisies, clover, flea bane, yellow hawkweed/king devil, white violet, wild strawberry, wild chamomile, purple vetch, heal-all, buttercup, cinquefoil, dandelion, yarrow, and common chickweed, the current bane of my existence – the field is a jumble of yellows and reds and whites and purples, and it’s just lovely. And a tick-haunt, as the Husband keeps reminding me.

Carrots and beets.

One leek, shallot and onion bed.

I’m seeing lots of box turtles and painted turtles on the roads, crossing to lay their eggs in hot dry sandy patches of earth. We’ve started looking out for Old Lady Snapper, and haven’t seen her yet. It’s possible we’ve missed her – she does an excellent job covering up her nest, so if we don’t happen to look when she’s in the process of egg-laying, we’d never know she’d been there. But the weather is slower to warm this year, and the trek through the thyme from the marsh and her cool, shady wet home is long, so I’m betting she’ll show up some day soon. The Old Barkie Boys would have announced her arrival, but the Furry People stay far away from her, so this year we’ll have to rely on our own chance sighting.

Egyptian onions - reproducing via top bulbs.

Unless Catman Dog figures out how to bark. His latest dog stunt has been hopping into the car with me to take the short ride from wart-side where I leave groceries, to put the car away in the garage. He looks slightly bemused afterwards.

I'm expecting to hear a bark from him any time now - maybe after indulging in too much catnip.