So, what about the garden?

[rsc]

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.


In fact, most things had grown a great deal while we were gone, and most everything was in bloom. The tomatoes are now close to 6 feet high, although they were still only in early-flowering stage (yesterday, for the first time, I saw small round objects that will be tomatoes someday, I hope). The apricot Agastache that I put in last year is in full bloom and looking healthy. The scabiosa (in a too-shady spot, like most of our plants) are way taller than they're supposed to be. The blueberries look like they'll start to be ripe in a few days (it's all but unheard of for them not to have started by the beginning of August), and we've actually gotten a few useable raspberries. There's Sanvitalia (volunteers from several years ago) coming up all through the marigolds, and johnny-jump-ups everywhere (also crabgrass everywhere, which is unfortunate but not surprising). Today the giant purple zinnias (not up to their full giant height) are just starting to open. We still have edible lettuce, and the beet greens, which I had more or less written off, are now big enough to use in salads as well.

And the blue geranium at Whale Rock is putting out a second bloom!

Both kinds of cosmos are blooming well, but both are disappointing in terms of variety of color. And this isn't because of lack of sun -- they're in the parts of the yard that still get plenty.

The only casualties, as far as I can tell, are the lobelias in one of the tubs on the west side of the house. Lobelias don't really like hot weather.


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.

Comments

[vasilatos]

You should have washed your car as well.