The Hottest Days of the Year

Harvest!

Harvest time has begun in earnest. Tomatoes are finally ready. We have as many bananna peppers as we know what to do with. (There must be something besides pickling them...need to find some recipes.) We have lovely jalapeño peppers that are just the right amount of heat to eat. We have cherry tomatoes. We harvested the first zucchini.

Early in the year, I worried that the winter squash I was planting were not taking off successfully. This is no longer the case.

There are five of them already formed in this mass of foliage that has already brought down one of the sunflowers I'd planted with them. 

The soaking that we took last month is now being replaced by some really strong heat. Today, for instance, we'll reach 90 & soupy with humidity. I do love this weather, and because it lasts such a short time I feel compelled to embrace it. This is not entirely easy to do when you have an October marathon to train for and you need to run 14 miles in it (as I did this morning). It is enervating, and it makes it difficult to summon the energy to get needed tasks taken care of outside in the afternoon. 

What is odd, this year, is that the ground is still saturated, and we don't need to water. In fact, the lawn seems to be sort of sick.

The lawn is sort of part of the garden, and it is a mess this year. We are inundated with creeping Charlie. The stuff is horrible. I've decided to take on just the area that I leveled off in the spring and make that the "well cared for lawn" part of the lawn. I've been trying to spend a little time each day on my hands and knees ripping creeping Charlie up by the roots (I hope). This is revealing all sorts of hideous insectoid life, the predominate feature of which seems to be a proliferation of legs. While one values all life, these things are really creepy and disgusting looking. They evoke an ancestral revulsion which must have enabled our forebears to survive by running away from the things. Pleh.

There must be a better way to kill creeping Charlie that does not involve Monsanto cancer products.

This area is adjacent to the garage, which has been left in a bit of an unfinished state since we were forced to move the raised bed away from it to combat the mouse infestation last fall. Next outside project is to add the second rain barrel, and sort out this section of the yard. A vision is coming to mind, but it won't be happening today. There's a reason the solar panels are placed on top of the garage, and that is because the sun blasts that side of the house unrelentingly. The microclimate will be well over the 90-degree air temperature.

We press on.