die, garden. die.
I can hardly stand to look at it, the dried husks evidence of the lush beauty of just a month ago. Our rare rainy summer has dried up and we are now experiencing the more typical summers of Oklahoma.
Hot. Dry. No rain in sight. Straight overhead sun. A horrid, hot, mouth-of-hell kind of wind blowing constantly. It's like being in a blast furnace and the plants show it. I'm too drained by the heat to care. I wish the garden would completely die so I can release the modicum of guilt I feel looking at the plants crying out for water.
I'm hunkered down for the duration of August, anxious for the psychological lift that comes with September 1. It doesn't generally change the temp, but it will bring a different slant to the sun, a little earlier sunset, a little hope that this inferno is not forever.
Enjoying your garden?
Hot. Dry. No rain in sight. Straight overhead sun. A horrid, hot, mouth-of-hell kind of wind blowing constantly. It's like being in a blast furnace and the plants show it. I'm too drained by the heat to care. I wish the garden would completely die so I can release the modicum of guilt I feel looking at the plants crying out for water.
I'm hunkered down for the duration of August, anxious for the psychological lift that comes with September 1. It doesn't generally change the temp, but it will bring a different slant to the sun, a little earlier sunset, a little hope that this inferno is not forever.
Enjoying your garden?
posted by BigAssBelle at 8:02 PM
23 Comments:
Nope. Heat killed mine. All my veggies gone. All my pretties dead. Only things left are the mums I spent to much money on from the local school for children with disabilities. Hmmmmm... Damn Southern heat.
What is this "garden" you speak of?
It was 42 degrees when I got up at 5:30. Do you just hate me? Season is so short here spring flowers bloom well into July. Now summer flowers have started. After living on a sage brush prarie for ten years this seems like paradise. Keep cool.
My garden is flourishing in the tropical weather conditions we've been having up here. And Lynette, it ain't much more fun when the humidity is over 70%. Saturday while I was out weeding I got to the point where I was drenched in sweat and no matter what, I could not dry off.
As I said the plants and especially the f---ing weeds just love it.
I do not garden. In fact my house plants die just from looking at them. Or maybe it's because I just look at them?
It's a good thing I never braved the rain to get out there and plant anything. Our poor, once-lush and green, grass is now faded, brown and crunchy!
I gave up on the back yard this year. It's mostly shaded by a huge mulberry tree (which has been dropping fruit since the second week in June). The hostas are holding out, but the lawn's dormant. Out front, I only have a small section of ferns along the front of the house and cosmos along the sidewalk to water. My hippie neighbor four doors down has had great success again this year with his sunflowers -- he replaced his front lawn with them and it's now like a small forest, with a tunnel over the sidewalk.
The squirrels are restless.
Oh, Lynette... I posted this over at JMG but for some weird reason thought immediately of your great plains brethern and have to share it with you (sorry for being off-topic):
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/small_town_holds_annual_gay_shame
I love my little patch of flower garden at my rental. I love my sunporch full of plants. I am a homosexual!
I felt remorse over killing the snails with poison. I feel remorse over watering during the driest California year in a long time, while fire rages on the other side of the hills....
But flowers are worth all that, aren't they?
I am enjoying my tropical garden at my little villa in Hawai'i, in my mind.
sucks, doesn't it kamrin. august was always our worst month in child welfare. more deaths, more violence in general.
david, you know, it's that comes with the house outside of the city. it's the thing that eats up exorbitant amounts of $$, that consumes time and energy which could be spent elsewhere. that garden.
bea ~ just . . . just shut up, honey. quit bragging. i do remember wearing coats in august in wyoming. sigh.
tony ~ it's the humidity here too. feels like being wrapped up in wet wool. no rain for the plants or the ground, but all of our enormous lakes are fast evaporating, making for hideous stifling muffling moisture. ugh.
SK . . . no, honey. try one of those spathophyllum thingies ~ prayer plant. can't kill them. impossible. try again, cupcake.
grace ~ ours is brown and crunchy too. and the birch trees are layering the crunchy grass with dry, heat-stressed brown crunchy leaves. brown brown brown. ugh.
steve ~ i think that's why it's bothering me so much this year. i really, really wanted to cut back on the size, number of plants, everything. there simply isn't time anymore, so my plan was to remove some beds from both front and back, plant half the # of veggies in the single bed in back. maybe i need to go native like your neighbor :-)
and the onion . . . it is laughable because it's the onion, but sad because the only reason it's sadly funny is because it's true: "But it's about a lot more than the clowns, the decorations, and those Shriner fellows in their tiny cars. It's about making folks feel sickened by the deviant homosexual lifestyle, like God wants us to."
thanks for the link.
well joe, it is mandatory that you have plants in order to be a 'mo, yes? and the little sunporch, sounds divine. it's the watering thing i can't stand to do and so they crisp up. i need to xeriscape and then maybe i could enjoy it again. and i did think they were worth anything 10-12 years ago. now i just want to be free of it all, get shed of everything that requires attention or care or maintenance. sigh.
nator, honey. let me help you hoist to your lips this great big cup of shut the fuck up. i jest. hawaii ~ i am envious as hell.
It IS a complete nasty aggravation to have spent the time and heart to see a garden grow only to have heat waves destroy it! That's hell for ya....burnt up! Was that the Christian God's punishment for being a liberal. And I know you just read about our COOL Summer, so cool, OUR tomatoes are staying green! But that's a lot easier (with hope of coming warmth?) to deal with than burnt offerings. Hang in there! The weather in the east and south this summer is frigthening! I DO feel bad for half the country! And thanks for keeping us fired up about our murderous executives in DC.
I'm with David. Too lazy to plant, too embarrassed of past garden failures to risk extended effort, lot's of glorious potted flowers that I can get rid of quickly if they become deceased...
I remember those horribly hot OK summers, and how running barefoot on the sidewalks and streets was terribly painful. we used to crack eggs on the blacktop and watch them cook!
Okay, okay...I feel sufficiently guilty now for complaining about the rain and temps in the upper 60's. I'd happily trade with you if I could...for a short while...but just until fall.
oh rodger, hush. i saw pictures of your garden yesterday. yeah, your tomatoes are green, but it's all just lush and gorgeous and ~ boo hoo hoo hoo hoo ~ *sniff* so green, so moist, so pretty. i am also green (with envy) and moist (with near heat stroke having been on the walk all afternoon) and not looking very pretty at all. and it is clear i have heat stroke because that actually made no sense whatsoever :-)
mark, at least i can go take refuge in your gorgeous photos of your pretty (and cool) (and green) garden. it cools me off just to see those. if it helps, we don't get any tomatoes either. with the squirrels and spider mites, i've eaten only two this year.
tater, remember the occasional dash over the dark tar driveways or parking lots? and how that molten black nastiness would stick to and blister your feet? or were you smarter than i was :-)
One other note about hot, hippie neighbor Jay: A couple of years ago, he planted some strange plants that a buddy gave to him. (The buddy also surreptiously seeded Jay's side yard with another "weed", which Jay claimed he didn't notice until the female plants were lush, five-foot beauties).
The moon flowers grew rapidly on a sand pile in the front yard, filling the air every evening with a fruity scent coming from pale lavender, trumpet-shaped blossoms. They only flowered at night. They required no water and topped out at six feet tall. Jimmie didn't know what they were called. He referred to them as moon flowers.
This year, the moon flowers are as dense towards the rear of Jay's front yard as the re-seeded sunflowers are towards the street. Throw in a hedge of burgeoning raspberries off to one side, and Jay's place looks like wilderness compared to the parched lawns on either side.
And get this. I figured out that Jay's moon flowers are actually datura stramonium , or jimsonweed. While the entire plant is highly toxic, small amounts have hallucinagenic properties. I'm not sure that telling him this would be wise...
i had a whole collection of daturas a few years back. picked up some at some missions in san antonio, some others in new mexico, some from rare seed catalogs.
back in the dark ages, nuns used to take the leaves of datura and rub them over their . . . um, well, their moist parts in their nether regions.
apparently the oils of leaves will inflame in lustful ways, but will also create the sensation of flying. hallucinogenic indeed. ;-) i think i love your neighbor, steve.
I was not smarter, we used to wear our burns as a badge of pride. "My feet are tougher than yours!" We used to think that if we toughened our feet to pain, we would be more like the native americans we idolized as young children. For us, the bad side was always the calvary in our little neighborhood wars. Contrary from beginning to end Belle, beginning.to.end.
Yes, I think you would love Jay, Lynette.
He's very fit from working as a construction foreman, is 27, six-one, about 190. He's a handsome, scruffy blond with a ponytail and blue eyes and a collection of hemp chokers. He's almost always shirtless, even when throwing a frisbee down the street for his dog in January. His little house used to be a concrete block, four-room caretaker cottage back before the neighborhood was built in the 20s. He's re-faced it in fieldstone and added a stained-glass cupola that he glows above the neighbors at night. His kayak hangs high in the towering black spruce in the front yard. He has no furniture, just a collection of sleeping bags. He loves John Prine. He calls me his "respectable" good friend and isn't afraid to wrap his arms around me if he feels like it.
I treasure the dude.
tater, i wish i could have followed you around with a camera when you were a little tyke. so sweet.
steve ~ i am in love. 27 and he listens to JOHN PRINE??? my hero John Prine?? Kayak? hugs? dog with a frisbee? shirtless? i am swooning . . .
Oh please..its been in the 100's daily here in the San Joaquin valley.
Brown is the color of nature here. :)
I fully expect to see camels and Bedouin tents in the back yard any day now.. I gave up on the garden about a month ago, as I fear the amount of daily water required may do the well in.
Crazy, the folks up north are drowning and we're parched, guess that whole global warming messing up the weather pattern things must be a hallucination of those crazy left wing academics, huh?
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