So, what about the garden?

jwg is doing the trip report (at least he's done the first installment), so I guess i don't have to. Instead I'll report about what happened to the garden while we were gone.

Of course we watered quite thoroughly the day before we left, but 9 days in late July can be tough on a garden if it's hot and rainless, and all indications were that that was how it was going to be for the foreseeable future. BC and Washington newspapers were shockingly uninformative about Boston-area (and especially Gloucester-area) weather, but as far as we could tell hot and rainless was what it was. So we were a little worried about what we might find when we got back. It didn't help that we arrived home after midnight Friday, so looking at the garden (or even the rain gauge) was really not something we could usefully do right away.

We got an unexpectedly hopeful hint from that day's Gloucester Daily Times, which had an article about how the summer squall on Wednesday had produced enough rain to cause the city's storm-drain system (as yet unseparated from its sewer system) to overflow. Sure enough, we got up Saturday morning to find 0.7 inches of water in the rain gauge, and pretty much everything in the garden in a state of rude health.
( Details for those who care )

I haven't heard any cicadas yet. Everything is late this year.

We decided on Sunday that we needed to do some more watering. This of course produced massive thunderstorms -- but we appear to have missed our aim slightly, as they seem to have been mostly south and west of here, and we didn't get any measurable rain out of them. Those of you who enjoyed the storm can thank us, and our apologies to those who would rather have done without them.