The Wetness and the Weeds

We can't complain about dryness this year. Usually, in July, we are searching the skies for relief. Now, every couple of days, there is another rain. Sometimes, it's a downpour, sometimes it gets downright torrential.  I don't want to seem ungrateful, but it has made it hard to garden. A lot of my early vegetable plantings were seriously over-watered. They responded by dying. I did get an onion and chard crop.

However, the weeds are loving it, since it has often been too wet to mow or pull them. They are growing like, well, weeds. Most of my yard is too steep for a riding mower. In those places, the weeds got away from me entirely. Usually, I use the self-propelled lawn mower there, but the weeds grew so rampant that now all that mower can do is push them over. That mower should be called Sort of Self-Propelled On Level Ground.

This is the steep hill by the garden, where Queen Anne's Lace and chicory have put down roots. Also planning to stay forever are lots of red clover and grass. I am hoping the common lilies blooming there will one day take over the slope. However, I thought that about the irises I transplanted there a few years ago. They are not seen above in the grassy upper right hand corner on this side of the fence.

The farmers were late getting their crops planted, so I didn't feel so bad to belatedly get a little patch of corn planted. With all the rain, it is growing so fast it makes me gasp. I did give it a brew made with diluted chicken manure, fish fertilizer and rain water, steeped in the sun for weeks. Corn likes that sort of thing.

It seems that even more rain has fallen north of here. The river has been up over my fishing beach for most of the summer. Last night they got five more inches upriver, which is a tad much. We have been in an almost continuous state of flash flood warnings.

The speck at the end of the bridge is Beau, to give some idea of what a fine big bridge it is. This isn't even the entire span. I took the pic from the middle. When we go down there at sundown, we have it all to ourselves.

Today, the river is noisily crashing against a tree that straddled one of the supports, limbs first. This is looking downriver. It sounds like the ocean. Lots of trees and brush float by, but very little trash . The Grand is muddy but clean.


For the time being, I am accepting that the weeds have won this season. I find it takes my mind off my defeat to sit and knit socks in the shady end of the garden. There, I admire my Primrose marigolds (Parks Inca II Hybrid). They match the daylilies along the fence.

The Juliet tomatoes are producing quantities of fruits. There are too many to eat and not enough to make Juliet Jam or can.

Every day, I yank up a big tub of weeds from the flower beds. It would be a good lesson in not planting more than I can weed,  if  I could ever learn it.

The Well-Dressed Tree

Christmas trees aren't the only ones that get to wear skirts. This one is more than a skirt, it's practically a ball gown.

When I discovered a ground cherry growing under my newest apple tree last summer, I left it to go to seed.

Had no idea it would sprout so many new plants.

                               First, there is the bell-shaped yellow flower.

                  Next comes the berry, in a lantern-like, five-sided husk.

Now the tree, a Yellow Delicious apple, looks ready to appear at a Cotillion. Dressed like Scarlett O'Hara, it's decked out in paper lanterns. Too cool.

Different Worlds

Every now and again, I leave my rural area and meet with some normal people in town.

Trying to blend in, I don't rush outside when I hear an airplane go over. I hear planes up here but they are usually too high to be seen.

The City Folk talk about reality television, which definitely leaves me out of the conversation. I keep mum about not having television reception. They would not be able to comprehend a deliberate choice to pass on that form of entertainment.

If I did mention it, there would be questions.

What did I do at night? I have a DVD player and can check movies out at the library. I sometimes get movies from Netflix. It's not like I am off the grid.

Telling them I spent hours this week looking at the moon with my telescope would not make them feel better about my life, I'm sure. In fact, there is no quicker way to clear the room than to bring up astronomy, gardening or knitting.

However, when the conversation got around to iced coffee, I jumped in. I said, "I love it, with plenty of half and half." The response floored me. "You mean you make it yourself?" I tried to cover my eccentricity by saying it is twenty miles to any fast food place. Feeling like I wanted to have them get a tiny glimpse of my life, I mentioned that the WalMart there has a hitching post for the Amish customers' horses and buggies. Dead silence and averted glances greeted that announcement.

They are very nice people. I'm sure they prefer their lifestyle and would consider me deprived, or depraved.

That would not have been the time nor the place to mention how happy I was to find a clutch of black snake eggs in the compost pile. I failed to show them this picture of critters that may help with the grasshopper situation. Incidentally, I raked the compost back over the eggs and left them to hatch out.

Pointless to take a bouquet of flowers to gatherings with City Folk. I tried that and the blooms were examined as if they were samples of moon rocks. They elicited queries as to what they were, indicating that they had never before seen daisies and lilies. No one said they were beautiful, which they were.

When my youngest granddaughter, Molly, came to stay for a few days, we had plenty of entertainment. She's only ten, but quite smart. Her family doesn't watch TV. She loved hearing all about astronomy. She understood Universal Time, which I thought was astonishing. She quickly learned how to find Jupiter and Venus with the astronomy binoculars. They are on loan from my son, who has light pollution in town. Molly used my telescope to locate Saturn and we found M4, a favorite globular cluster in Scorpio. We looked at star charts and that little kid grasped Right Ascension and Declination.

We also picked mulberries along the road, snacking on them right there. On rainy days, we worked a big puzzle and Molly crocheted, learning new stitches. She helped me figure out a Fair Isle pattern for a vest. She picked strawberries while I mowed. We made a batch of freezer jam. Another day, we made strawberry ice cream in the Donvier ice cream maker. We gave Beau a bath out in the yard. We made Sun Oven bread. Molly helped me herd three calves back inside the fence down the road. She took pictures of butterflies on the butterfly weed flowers with my telephoto lens camera.We also went to the nearby Amish town so she could enjoy seeing all the horse-drawn buggies.

We cooked our own food. Molly made us delicious French Toast for breakfast and I made dinner. It never occurred to us to watch a movie on TV. We were too busy experiencing reality.