Summer’s Lease is Up

Sonnet XVIII

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
    So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

I love Shakespeare’s sonnets. This one always comes to my mind in the last days of summer. It is a beautiful love poem. And Will is right, summer’s lease does have all too short a date. It is over far too quickly. Yesterday was the autumnal equinox, the first day of fall. If summer’s lease is short, autumn’s is more like a three week rental with no guarantee it will last that long or measure up to expectations. We like to think the second week of October is autumn at its peak here, but many years it’s finished before then. I think this will be one of those years. The trees are changing quickly and the leaves so far have not been vibrant. There’s still hope they will brighten.

A bouquet of dahlias.

There is a definite feel of autumn in the air. The mornings are almost always foggy as the cool night air settles in advance of the sunrise. The aroma of damp leaves in the dewy mornings and dry grass in the warm afternoons makes breathing it in a delight. And the light of the sun has that long slant to it that makes the world look old and mellow.

One morning last week.

The harvest continued all week and a lot of it we finished. On Monday Miriam and I made sauerkraut. We went out to the big garden and harvested all the cabbages that were left. They were a sorry lot – all of them puny, many of them split, most of them chewed on by slugs. There were twenty heads. We had to cut away most of the leaves to reach the usable part. It took all twenty to make one bucket of kraut. Last year our cabbages were huge. It only took three to fill a five gallon bucket. So we salted this batch and covered it and set it on the back porch to ferment. If all goes well, we can start using it in about six weeks.

On a morning walk last week.

In the meadow on my morning walk.

I spent Tuesday and Thursday morning cooking down tomatoes into sauce. Friday morning I made tomato soup that we will freeze dry. I’ve reached the point now where the smell of cooking tomatoes has grown old. And there are still so many on the back porch to be processed. But that’s a blessing, no matter how tired I am of smelling tomatoes. On Friday I pulled up the tomato vines with what was left on them and threw them to the pigs.

Neither the Thayns nor the rain arrived midweek as hoped for. Tabor is out of town and Rachel had too much going on at home to come up with the children. And the tiny bit of rain that fell on Wednesday wasn’t enough to even register as precipitation. It evaporated before it hit the ground. Things were getting very dry. The rain barrel down at the barn had run dry and I was carrying water from the house. I had to water parts of the flowerbeds where I have biennial flower seeds sprouting to keep them from wilting. Two disappointments.

Sunrise over the beaver pond.

With the vegetable garden nearly finished for the year, only two major harvest events remain – apples and pigs. We began harvesting early apples in late August and they are done, but the main crop is yet to come. From mid September to late October, there are ten trees whose fruit ripens. Most of it we plan to make into cider. We love applesauce and pie filling and freeze dried apple slices, but most of all, we love cider. In a good year we’ll press thirty or more gallons of it. We drink some of it fresh, and freeze most of it to enjoy for months afterward. Some of it I want to turn into vinegar. But all the hope hanging in the branches of those apple trees suffered a hit at the end of the week. More on that later.

A sunset last week.

The pigs are a major chore now. They want to eat continually. Any time they see me out in the garden or in the orchard, they grunt and squeal, demanding attention. They aren’t cute little piglets anymore, but big bossy hogs. We still have the rest of September and all of October to keep meeting the demands of their prodigious appetites. I’ll be glad when they have finally been converted into ham, sausage, and bacon. That may seem brutal, but that’s how it goes with pigs.

So no Thayns and no rain on Wednesday, but on Friday the Fosters came for a visit. They arrived that afternoon with a moving van full of their things to put in their new house. We helped them unload and then they came to our house to spend the night. It was a quick trip, but we had some time to pick raspberries, eat dinner, belatedly celebrate Tosh’s birthday, and play a game on Friday night. They left yesterday morning to go back. Soon they will be living close by and we’ll get to see them a lot, and that will be nice.

Helping the Fosters unload.

Picking raspberries with Sarah.

Yesterday, the first day of fall, was another busy day. Stacey was busy all day canning tomatoes and apples. I spent the day working outdoors. It was a lovely, warm day, with bright sunshine and a soft breeze. Out in the big garden, I pulled up all the tomato cages and stacked them for winter storage. Then I pulled up all the spent tomato vines and tossed them to the pigs. Kurt was busy on his tractor tilling a bed to plant garlic and preparing others for next year.

Around 3:00 the sky began to grow cloudy and I heard distant thunder. My phone buzzed to say the weather service had issued a severe thunderstorm alert with heavy rain, high winds, and hail. I hurried and did the chores and then finished up all my outdoor jobs. I wanted to bring in the pumpkins before the rain came, so Stacey came out and helped me carry them into the woodshed and onto the back porch. I brought in all my tools and closed everything down. And then I waited. Miriam and Hannah were out metal detecting down by Seven Bridges, about ten miles to the west of us. They arrived home and said they had to quit because it was pouring rain down there. I could see storm clouds to the east and west of us and I could hear the thunder, but the sky cleared over Gold. No rain.

Bringing in the pumpkins.

Later, around 6:00 p.m., the sky darkened again. There was lots of loud thunder to the east and heavy roiling clouds. My hopes rose again. I felt a dozen drops on my face and arms – and that was all. The sky cleared again. To tease me twice in one afternoon with storms that passed me by seemed especially cruel. I was disappointed. But then . . .

Storm clouds approaching.

At 7:00 p.m. the storm finally arrived. The wind shifted and came in strong and cold from the north. The temperature dropped from 78° to 53° in a matter of minutes. Dark clouds began to swirl across the sky. Rain began to fall and then turned into a wind-driven torrent. And then the hail began. We don’t often get hail here. It pelted down. The sound of it pounding on the metal porch roof was deafening. The lawn was soon covered with it. It tore leaves from the trees. From the back porch, I watched it ripping through the orchard and my heart sank. It stopped after a half hour. An hour later, the rain let up a little and, although there was still some tremendous thunder and lightning, I went out to walk through the orchard and to check on the pigs. It was dark, so I wore a headlamp. From what I could see, it looked like half of the apples were on the ground – most of them apples that are not ready to be picked. When I reached the big garden, I could see that the dahlias had been severely battered. There were huge puddles with hail floating in them across the lawns. The pigs, for some reason, were not in their shelter. They were standing out in the rain. I could tell they were scared, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I came back in the house and said a prayer. I was dreading what I would find in the orchard in the morning.

Hail.

Yesterday’s storm was not a happy way to begin the fall season. At first light this morning I went out to survey the damage. The world was changed. The flowerbeds are tattered and flattened. The beautiful colchicums are a soggy mat of pink. The nasturtiums are a shredded mess. The big maples in the front yard were stripped of most of their leaves. Everything was plastered with wet leaves, the lawn, the house, the barn. The hail tore holes through the window screen on the north side of the house. I dreaded walking through the orchard. It looks like half the apples are on the ground and the most of the leaves torn off the trees. The majority of the apples weren’t ready to be picked, so I don’t know if I can salvage anything from them. The ones still on the trees will probably be okay if they weren’t damaged and it’s too soon to tell. It damaged the high tunnel out in the big garden, bent its frame and tore the screen windows on one side. And the poor dahlias looked even worse in the daylight.

The colchicums before and after.

The angel's trumpet before and after.

So many apples knocked down.

On our drive to and from church, we noted storm damage in places, but the further north we went, the less we saw. In some places along route 449, there were still piles of unmelted hail on the roadsides. When we got home from church, we took another walk around the garden to see if it is as bad as I thought it was earlier. It is. I will spend a lot of time this week cleaning up the mess. I tried to console myself by saying it was time to clean things up anyway, but some of the nicest things like the last flowers, would have gone on for a few more weeks and now they are gone. Such is life, I guess. Nature is unpredictable and sometimes destructive and we have to live with what it gives us. There is still the possibility of some fall color on the hillsides. And there is still the possibility, although somewhat diminished, of apples. And when the garden is cleared, I can start to plan what I will plant next year. There is always next year, I hope.