Friday, September 9, 2016

Heat

The summer has been hot. Too hot. As I drove home from work yesterday my car's dashboard kindly informed me that it was 104 degrees outside. I'm pretty sure the car exaggerated, but I understand the impulse. It was hot.


The poor garden has been hot, too, and dry. Of all the garden chores in the world watering is my least favorite, but also the chore my garden would most like me to do regularly. Poor garden - dependent on a person who loves it deeply, but cannot provide what it most needs. Tough love, garden, tough love. It seems to be surviving despite me.




I added espalier apples around the vegetable garden this spring. I finally got my Cox's Orange Pippin and a couple other heirloom apples that I've been reading about and wanting for years. I am hoping that they will help add a little structure and screening to the veggie garden, which looks nice in the early spring when the currants bloom and the kale comes up, but then declines into messiness and weeds come summer. I also just like to espalier things.
Milo doesn't seem to mind the heat too much, despite being a bulldog.




But I still blame all the garden destruction - decapitated lilies, yellowed lawn, and dog wallows in the flower beds - on him.




We have another creature I can blame some of the destruction on, perhaps. We have been seeing a rat in the garden, a beautiful sleek creature that frequents the back porch and the ground-level window of Grant's office. I asked Grant if he had seen the rat, and added "And did you notice? He has the most enormous -" and Grant cut in "balls. Yes, I know. Huge." What does it say about us, I wonder, that we both notice rat genitalia? To be fair, it was pretty hard to ignore. So while our well endowed rat is beautiful and I have no real problem with garden rats (aside from plague, of course) I'm not sure our neighbors feel the same, so I'll be working on new, screened compost bins this fall.