Working and Weather

August is the last full month of summer and, often before it's over, autumn has already begun to encroach on it. In fact, it's already at it. Perhaps the lack of rain has brought it on, but the sumac has started to turn red. The maples are dropping leaves, but they are dry, brown leaves. The goldenrod is blooming and the first wild asters opened along the path to the barn. I wish August was more aggressive, demanding its full complement of summer weather.

Sumac on the front bank turning red too soon.

Monday morning was a perfect summer morning, bright, cool, calm. When I went down to open the barn, there was a low mist hanging over the beaver pond and a flock of ducks making a ruckus. They sounded happy, like they were having an animated discussion about breakfast. I spent the cool of the morning harvesting. I picked a cauliflower, a bowlful of broccoli, and a couple of cucumbers. I also brought in some zucchini. Most of them were usable, but one huge one that was hiding and went undetected for a few too many days got chopped up and fed to the pigs.

Where did that big one come from?

After that, I spent some time tying up tomatoes. I have been very vigilant about keeping them under control. I'm pinching out all the suckers and have them trained up their support poles. There is a lot of nice looking green fruit on them. They should start ripening soon.

One of my tomato beds.

While the morning was still cool, I went out to the big garden and deadheaded the dahlia row. I planted that long row of dahlias to use as cut flowers, but so far the Japanese beetles have managed to maim every blossom and we haven't brought in a single bouquet.

The next task that morning was trimming garlic. It had been hanging in the rafters in the pavilion out in the big garden for two weeks and was ready. I set up a table and trimmed off the dried tops and roots and bagged them up. We will freeze dry most of it and make it into garlic powder.

My garlic trimming station.

Out in the big garden, in front of the pea row, Kale planted marigolds. The peas are done now and will be pulled up soon. The marigolds are still going strong. They have been delightful all summer. Now I want to plant a whole row of them every year. After I finished trimming the garlic I went down the marigold row and deadheaded them. I love to do that. I love the smell of them on my hands.

After deadheading marigolds.

Next, I pulled up more onions and set them to dry in the sun. Later in the afternoon, after dinner, Stacey, Miriam, and Hannah helped me tie them up and hang them in the rafters of the pavilion where the garlic had been. They will hang and cure for a week or two. When they are done, some will get bagged for use in the coming weeks, the rest will get frozen or freeze dried.

More onions pulled to cure.

Onions hanging to cure.

By the time I'd finished pulling up onions, the day had heated up. There was no breeze and the heat settled in and baked everything. With it being so dry, I dragged the hose out and set a sprinkler in the raised bed garden and let it run for an hour, moving it every fifteen minutes to reach each bed. It was so hot by then (89°), that I came indoors for a siesta. In the afternoon a package arrived, a shade cloth I ordered. I'm growing late lettuce in one of the raised beds under the arch panel. Lettuce doesn't like hot sunshine, so I thought if I could stretch a shade cloth on the arch over the bed, the lettuce would be happier. It took some effort to get it in place and secured. I hope it works. The lettuce seed is already sprouting.

The shade-clothed arch, view one, midday.

The shade-clothed arch, view two, evening.

Missy and her children left Monday morning to return home. Their visit seemed so short. Later that afternoon, Kale and Kohl and their children left to go down to the Thayn's house for a few days. That meant there were no children on the compound. I have to admit that, although I like having children around, I also like the quiet when they aren't. No bikes and gators zooming around. No noise at all, except for the pigs. While I'm working in the garden anywhere where the pigs can see me, they watch me and grunt their demands for food. They have a bin full of food they can eat from whenever they want, but they prefer the bucket of slop I make for them every day. They seem to think I should bring them slop every time they see me.

Tuesday was another perfect summer day, August as it should be. By 9:00 a.m. the dew was gone, it was in the mid 80s, and I was out soaking it all in. The sun beat down and the garden gave off a purely summer smell – a heady mix of dusty earth, roasting grass, transpiring herbs, and the sweet perfume of thousands of phlox blossoms. The phlox are at their peak now. They dominate the garden. Some are over four feet tall, with inflorescences in shades of pink, red, and white. They are beautiful, the queens of the late summer garden.

The long border, Tuesday morning.

Wednesday morning, pink phlox, pink sky.

Phlox, bee balm, and coneflowers.

I went out to work in the morning, thinking I could last until lunchtime. I selected the next section of flowerbed for an overhaul and set to work. I only lasted an hour. I retired to the cool of the house and a fan and a book to wait until the evening. I'm reading two books by C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man. The only books of his that I'd read before were The Chronicles of Narnia and an attempt at his Space Trilogy back in my teens that never made it past the middle of the first book, Out of the Silent Planet. I wanted to explore some of his other works. I finished Mere Christianity and found Lewis's insights profound. Now I'm reading The Abolition of Man, but I'm only a few pages into it. He's a very deep thinker.

Tuesday night around 10:30, Miriam and Hannah were outside watching the Perseid meteor shower. Stacey and I had already retired for the night. Suddenly they burst into our room and told us to come outside quick. We went out into the back yard and they pointed up. There was a glowing nebulous mass moving north across the sky. They told us it had appeared in the middle of the sky, grown larger, and then began to swirl. We watched it until it moved out of sight over the horizon. Hannah took a video of it. We had no idea what it was. Other people across the state saw it too. The explanation they gave on the news on Wednesday morning was that it was "a frozen plume of fuel from a rocket's exhaust, which reflects the sunlight and appears to spin in the atmosphere." This plume, if that is what it was, was probably from a Vulcan rocket launched at Cape Canaveral earlier that evening. We were hoping for some more mysterious explanation.

Wednesday morning when I went out on my walk, I could feel that the weather was changing. It was cooler. There was heavy dew. The sky was beautiful. It had a different, softer look to it. I saw on the forecast that we had a 90% chance for rain that afternoon and I had great hopes. It had been twelve days since the last rain fell and that rain wasn't much. Water is usually not a problem here, but now and then we have a drought. I know twelve days without rain hardly qualifies as a drought in most parts of the world, but here, where we're used to ample rainfall, it does. At least I think so. And so does the lawn, which has gone brown and crispy, and the garden that wilts every afternoon. So there was that 90% chance. I went out to work and watched the sky.

On my Wednesday morning walk: the long border.

On my Wednesday morning walk: east across Gold.

On my Wednesday morning walk: the beaver pond.

Around 10:00 a.m. it began to drizzle, but it stopped after ten minutes. I thought, if this is the expected rain, I'm going to be really sad. I checked the forecast again. They'd lowered the chances of rain to 80% after 1:00 p.m., but now they said to expect thunderstorms. So I still had high hopes. To show how hopeful I was, I brought in the garden hose. It had been stretched across the yard for days. I hadn't wound it up before because I knew I'd have to use it again. Now it was wrapped up. "See weather?" I said aloud, "I'm counting on you. Bring on the rain." I talk to the weather sometimes. And it is often not polite. I kept on working. The sky was overcast and the air heavy. I thought that, if anything would hasten the rain, it would be starting a big project. The weather loves to interrupt my big projects.

The project I chose was digging out a section of the long border. This wasn't just a surface cleaning, I was going to go deep. That part of the long border is full of creeping bellflower (Campanula rapunculoides) that forms spreading mats. It has pretty purple flowers that bloom in midsummer, but it is a thug, crowding out other more desirable plants. It has thick fleshy roots that go down a foot or more. I was determined to remove every bit of root because any tiny fragment left will sprout and grow. I used my trusty and rusty garden fork and began the excavation. I've mentioned before, probably a lot, that we have stony soil here. In digging down a foot in an area 3'x4', I brought up a huge pile of rocks. I've been digging in that bed for twenty-five years and still find rocks like this anytime I dig. I managed to get a lot of the roots out, but I'm sure I missed some and will have to go after them when they start to grow again.

The rocks and roots from my digging.

At 2:30, just as I was ready to move on to another part of the garden, it began to rain again. No lightning or thunder, just light rain. It only lasted for twenty minutes. Then out came the sun and dried up all the rain, just like in the itsy-bitsy spider. I checked the forecast again. Now there was a 60% chance of thunderstorms after 5:00 p.m. I still had hope. But no. No storm ever arrived. In the end we got 0.01 inches of rain. It evaporated almost as soon as it hit the ground. I had to pull out the hose again. The weather system did leave us with a pretty sunset, but that was all.

Sunset on Wednesday looking east.

Sunset on Wednesday looking west.

All my younger chickens, and some of the old ones too, were in full feather and taking liberties as to where they roamed. Every morning eight or nine of them would fly out of their yard and wander around the property. I wouldn't mind them free ranging if they would stay in the right areas, but they don't. They come across the yard to the flowerbeds and root them up. They scratch along the side of the road. They cross the road to forage in the neighbor's yard. Some were even hanging out on the front porch. That was unacceptable. They do too much damage to the flowerbeds, they poop on the porch, and I can't risk them getting hit by cars coming down our road or causing traffic problems. One even started laying her eggs outside the fence. So Wednesday night, after they'd all gone to roost, Stacey and I clipped wings. We thought we'd clipped the worst offenders, but on Thursday morning there were a few out roaming that we missed. We'll go down again tomorrow night and clip the ones we missed.

One wandering hen has decided to lay her eggs outside the fence.

Thursday was a doctor's appointment day so I didn't accomplish much in the garden. I didn't get home until 2:30. It was a pleasant day, sunny and warm. I spent what was left of the afternoon weeding. Later, Stacey and I helped Kurt dig up the potatoes. Our potato crop this year was small – small in size and quantity. I think the potato beetles took a heavy toll on the plants. The beetles were bad this year.

Digging potatoes.

When I went out on my morning walk on Friday, there was no dew. The grass was dry as dust. In places it actually crunched as I walked on it. After morning scripture reading, prayers, and chores, I went out to water the garden. I was dismayed that many of the plants were wilting so early in the day. As I watered, I prayed for rain. I spent most of the morning after that trimming shallots. We had a good crop this year.

Shallots trimmed and ready to use.

My friend Pat, my poultry lady, arrived at 9:00 that morning with a dozen guinea eggs. I had three broody hens, so I gave them each four eggs. Incubation time for guinea eggs is 26 to 28 days. If all goes well, and that's a big if, these eggs should hatch some time around September 10th to the 12th. I wondered how reliable my broodies would be. They'd been on their nests for two weeks already, but I'd been taking the eggs away. I hoped they wouldn't get tired of being broody now and get off their nests. The other problem that concerned me was that they leave their nests once a day to eat and drink and poop, but when they go back to the nesting boxes, they don't always get back on the same nest. And the laying hens will be laying their daily eggs in those nests too. I put some fake eggs in one of the nesting boxes hoping it would lure the hens into using that nest instead of the broody hens' nests. I figured I'd have to monitor the situation very closely. I was right.

The three broody hens on their new guinea eggs.

On Friday afternoon the Shillig crew left for the weekend. They went up to Niagara Falls and then took Kohl and her children to the airport. With Kohl's departure, I think that marks the end of summer company.

That evening we had a pizza party. For years we watched the Dunn children, Guy, Kyle, Cal, and Laura. From the time they were born until they were in school, we (and by that I mean Stacey) watched them while their parents worked. They are all grown up now. Guy graduated from college this spring. Kyle and Cal work on their family's huge dairy farm. Laura is leaving for college soon. We had them here for dinner. It was fun to sit and tell stories of all the times we had together when we were all younger. Sarah and Tosh were also here and they have company, their friends Ken and Tamara Malynar from Detroit. So there were twelve of us all together. We had pizza, a cucumber salad with ingredients fresh from the garden, watermelon, and a cantaloupe also from the garden. For dessert we had a peach cobbler that Sarah made, with vanilla ice cream. Sarah made a panna cotta with a mixed berry compote for me. It was all so good. After dinner we sat and played games and had a very nice evening together.

A game of Take Five after dinner.

Playing Architects with the Dunns.

When I went down after dark to close the barn, I went in to check on my broody hens. Sure enough, one of them had abandoned her nest. That didn't take long. So I took the four eggs from that nest and gave two each to the other hens. Everything else was fine.

Yesterday was a take it easy day. The most strenuous thing I did was water the garden. That meant lugging 150 feet of garden hose all over the yard and took me almost two hours. So that was strenuous enough. I'm glad we have a good well. Aside from the regular chores and a few loads of laundry, I didn't do much of anything. I think it's nice to have a day like that now and then.

This weekend was our Stake Conference. Our stake center is in Jamestown, New York, two hours away. There were two meetings yesterday and another today. I have a hard time spending so much time in the car, so I only went to today's meeting. Miriam had to work on Saturday and couldn't go. Stacey and Hannah went both days. Stacey was one of the speakers today. During today's session, Tosh was sustained to be ordained a high priest and called to serve on the Stake High Council. After the session, his friend Ken ordained him and a member of the stake presidency set him apart as a high counselor. Then after that, we went to the airbnb that the Fosters and Malynars were staying at and had lunch with them and the Shilligs. Then we drove home. 

Lunch after church today.

It rained as we drove through New York on our way to Jamestown and on our way back. I was hoping to find that it had rained here, and it had. It was enough to replenish the rain barrel down at the barn and revive things a bit in the garden. It was a blessing, but we need more. I just looked at the forecast for the coming week. It looks like the heat will ease up a little and there is a chance for rain tonight, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I hope the predictors are more accurate this week. Now that the summer guests are all gone, things will settle back into the  regular mode of life here. Harvest time will keep us busy. August will keep up its too quick pace. Life goes on.