Pretty Good Gardening
It began as a hard week for garden work, although we were able to harvest enough ripe tomatoes to can 8 pints of Italian tomato sauce and 9 pints of tomatoes. That’s hardly any for the rest of the year, so we’re hoping to can more today or Sunday. The pole beans – green, wax and purple – have been coming in plentifully. We’ve had beans several nights and I froze 23 pounds so far. Since the woodchuck eat all our broccoli and red cabbage, we really need lots of beans to last through the winter and early spring. I have pureed and frozen 4 containers of pattypans and yellow squash. We are still getting some zucchini, but it’s slowing down. The hot peppers are getting ready every few days and I freeze most of them.
After the exhaustion of taping the audiobook last week – and I do mean exhaustion, so much so I was useless Friday and Saturday – I finally got back to my own work and wrote three poems this week. The weather has cooled down a bit and dried out some the last couple of days. We are still in the most severe drought we’ve ever experienced here. Eight weeks with one and only one twenty minute rain until Thursday, when we had a decent rainy day, soft gentle rain for a few hours. Bushes, trees, flowers are dying. We can’t get enough well water to save everything. Climate change is a nasty business. If we don’t get rid of Trump, we will cook here in dust.
The rain on Thursday with the cool temperatures it brought was a delight. Beautiful morning! Precious wonderful wet rain, the best kind! It was a complete surprise as the weather service give us only a 10% chance of rain and Noah, only 20%. Only the weatherman on Channel 5 mentioned rain as a possibility on the Cape. I am grateful he was correct.
I worry about hurricanes. The ocean water is unusually warm this summer, which can bring them ashore here. The ocean used to be cool enough here so hurricanes would lose their strength most years if they made it this far north – not always but most of the time. Not this year. And of course, with the warm waters come great white sharks. All they want to do is eat seals, but people can get in their way and especially in wet suits, be mistaken for a seal.
I am still using the abundant beet harvest. Thursday morning, I made my borscht for the second time this summer. I haven’t been able to do that in a decade or more. Last year, I had zero beets and only one [huge] parsnip. So far, the parsnips look good. They seem to like raised beds as do the beets. My pansies on the porch finally succumbed to the heat. I pulled the dead and dying plants and will try to grow something else in the long pots – maybe herbs or lettuce.
My friend Gigi came over Wednesday. We ate our respective lunches on the torrid sunporch ten feet apart. I gave her a book on foxes I had bought [no usable library] and enjoyed reading. I adore foxes for their beauty, grace and usefulness in reducing the rodent population. In the Harwich neighborhood where Gigi has her gallery, there are some very tame foxes whom someone there obviously feeds. I know she admires them and hoped she would enjoy the book as much as I did. Even though it’s by a British author and about British foxes, there’s enormous overlay with our familiar red and sometimes grey foxes. We watched a fox catch a mouse and play with it as some cats do while we were picnicking with Gigi and her husband Ralph in the garden of the gallery some years ago. So, I know she likes foxes.
The power went off Thursday. I imagined somebody ran into a pole as the rain could not do any damage, being gentle and with no observable wind. Tourists slam themselves into poles, other cars, school buses and ravines every summer. They also park on curves of narrow winding country roads to pick beachplums or blueberries or to watch a bird or other animal. Guess what happens when another car comes around that curve? The outage, however, according to the next day’s newspaper, turned out to have been the result of “animal interference” -- an osprey nest.
Yesterday we didn’t need air conditioning day or night. The air was remarkably breathable and fresh. It’s early now so I don’t know how it will go today. Seems okay so far but it’s very early as I write this.