“Weather means more when you have a garden.  There’s nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans.”

~Marcelene Cox

I am so grateful for the rain.  This week, we’ve had at least a little sprinkle every single day.

Yesterday afternoon, we had the most delicious sunshower.  In fact, “sunshower” is my new vocabulary word for the week, a serendipitous discovery I made when trying to look up a quote from a George MacDonald novel.

Well, it might be from George MacDonald, and it might not.  I’m no longer so sure.  Something about the sun shining on the rain, and the rain falling on the sun.  A little girl character says it.  Of that I’m almost sure.  Does that sound familiar to you?  (If you can place that quote, I’d be in alt if you’d drop me a line.)

Anyway, that’s what was happening here.  The sun was shining on the raindrops, and the rain was pouring down on the sunbeams.  No cache of diamonds could ever compete with the sparkle.  I was transfixed by the beauty, especially just after the rain stopped, and the eaves continued to drip steadily, forming a shimmering, gold-beaded curtain.

Just beneath the beaded curtain, puddles formed, and the droplets spread their perfect ripples over and over, each circle of influence running into another’s circle until the whole thing became a work of modern art:  geometry and light.

Why didn’t I get out my camera, you ask.

Well, I did.  But the light was already fading by then.  And I am always a little bit happy when I forget to photograph something, or only remember too late.  Experience should be immediate and true, or I’ll lose the fire of inspiration and the artistic and creative connection with Nature, with life, that I crave.  It saddens me when I come across a blogger who has lost sight of that in her determination to photograph every detail of her life.  Reflection and documentation and creation should be, in my opinion, byproducts of the original interaction with the moment.

I also wonder if that mania for documenting every lovely moment is merely a display of our doubt of the natural abundance of our lives.  Last Christmas, I fell prey to this insidious mistrust.  Looking back, I know now that I was afraid, with my garden photography days “behind me” for the season, my little vegetable garden dormant, that I wouldn’t have anything left to blog about — and so I took picture after picture of our family gatherings, the food, the table arrangements, the torn giftwrapping sprawled inelegantly across my parents’ wood floors.

At one point, my mother pulled me aside and asked me, gently, to come out from behind the lens.  She pointed out that photographs were no substitute for being part of the action.

Of course she was right.

It is my experience that there are always more opportunities for photos than we can possibly use.  I find myself in exactly this posture with regard to my story ideas.  If I were to live for 500 years, I’d never get to all the good ones in my notebooks.  That’s just the way it is.  The world is bursting with creative energy.  That’s no reason to get in a hurry, to become anxious and afraid to miss something great.

As Minor White said, “Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer it has chosen.” In this instance, the sun’s rays lingered on the upper curves of the cherry tomatoes just long enough for me to capture a bit of that leftover glow.  The dark clouds were rolling in after the rainstorm, just to increase my sense of being in some Alice-in-Wonderland-type space, or in an unannounced game of cosmic Opposite Day.

I wonder if that strange sequence of events was meant to remind me that nothing is really impossible. Maybe – probably — it’s not really important to know.

Namasté y’all.

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I uploaded two photos last night, one of the clouds that boil up from farther down in the valley, just over the lake.  You can see them coming through a break in the trees in our backyard, and often you can feel them, too, in the wind’s brisker pace, the way the leaves hang straight down in the humidity, and the way something feels on my skin (F. suggested barometric pressure) in a way that I know presages rain.

Then comes the lightning, and the thunder, and debris starts to fly.  There is a lot of small debris in a forest.  It’s a kind of scary thrill for me at this point.

Yes, I love storms.  Love them.  Something in me resonates to the flash and the fury, the wildness and the drumbeat of the unknown danger.

But lately, I don’t care as much about the storm part as I do about the rain.  I want it to come down, a steady rain, a long rain, a drenching, and hopefully one that comes down so slowly and gently that it has time to soak in and doesn’t cause another devastating flash flood in the garden.  Some days, I’d even accept a little garden damage if we could just get a good soaking rain.

It never seems to happen, though, which is why the second photo I uploaded last night was this one:

A wild grape leaf on the edge of the forest, showing exactly how much rain we last got when the clouds passed through.  Note that most of the leaf surface is still pitifully dry.

And keep in mind that most of my garden is situated either below or partially edged by the forest canopy, which blocks out a lot of that rain.  It has to rain a lot more to reach the ground around my zucchini and Hungarian peppers, for instance.

It’s been so frustrating.  However, I try and practice detachment and acceptance and just dole out a little extra love to the plants when I can.  There is no use railing at the universe or complaining about the weather.  So I keep deciding not to, even while I wish for rain.

I typed the title of this post last night after the photos finished loading, and then I went to bed.*

Here’s the weird part.  Though there was no rain in the forecast, when I woke up this morning the ground was wet.  And I mean nicely soaked, not waterlogged — and also not at the other end of the spectrum where the dust has been just barely tamped down by a few drops.  And I slept right through it.  It must have been a soft, gentle rain over a few hours’ time, for the ground to feel this way beneath my feet.

Wish granted?

It sounds a little crazy; right?  I mean, I know I have mad manifesting skills, but this is over the top.  Just type a post title and go to sleep, and let the universe handle it.

Huh.  I think I should warn y’all, the title of my next post may be something like, “oh I wish oodles of well-paid freelance work would just tumble into my email box.”

Have you had any wishes granted lately?

*I often do this, letting the vague ideas marinate in me overnight, waiting to see what comes of it in the morning’s writing.

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The June bugs arrived, right on time. But the heat wave was a little early.

My apologies for being absent from the blog for a few days.  I believe my motivation to do anything at all has evaporated as quickly as the perspiration from my skin.  We’ve been enduring several days of heat indexes flirting with the 100º mark* — without central air conditioning.  I’ve felt like I’m melting.

In the heat of the day, all I want to do is lay around with the blinds drawn.  Maybe if I’m feeling spectacularly energetic I’ll read a book or daydream.

Leo demonstrates ideal heat-of-the-day behavior.

The temperatures and heavy humidity are akin to some of the worst days in July or August, and of course I’m disappointed because my glorious June days, the best of the summer for gardening, have been replaced by this monstrous heat wave, 10 days and counting.

Today the high came down a few notches, to within about 10 degrees of the average temperatures for this time of year, and F. and I took advantage of the morning hours to build the final supports for the family heirloom half-runner beans, which are really beginning to run.  It was still so muggy out at 10:00 a.m. that my sunglasses fell off when I bent over to pull a weed:  the ear pieces slipped off my sweat-slick ears.  Gotta love that.

Cross your fingers for the Victory Garden; won’t you?  Some things are really struggling in this heat, even with adequate moisture, and the tomatoes have stopped producing flowers, which I’d been warned would happen if we went five days in a row topping 92 degrees.  That means there will definitely be a gap in fruit production later on in the summer… which is fine with me as long as it’s not the end of fruit production.

Of course, some crops thrive in the heat, like the aforementioned beans and those stars of the summer garden:  okra.

Okra seedlings, early June.

But the best plan for human beings seems to be energy conservation.  Me, I’m just riding a wave of lethargy and looking forward to a weekend of family affairs in the Atlanta area, knowing I’ll be spending the night in my sister’s lovely home, staying cool as a cucumber with central air.

I would sound even more excited, but I’m still a little warm from packing the car just now, so I’ll keep it low-key.

Have a wonderful — and hopefully cool — weekend, everybody!

*That’s Fahrenheit, obviously.  It’s about 38º C.

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Zinnia elegans "Zowie Yellow Flame"

For this month’s Hot, Loud & Proud Meme, the landscape is finally full of real sizzle.  Not only the colors, but the temperatures are heating up, too.

I always seem to forget quite how hot a summer in the humid Southeast can be.  Just now, the sun is taking it up that last little fiery notch.  Despite having been raised here, these first truly sultry days of the new season are a time of adjustment.

Schedules must be altered to allow for work in the garden in the earliest daylight hours.  Window shades get drawn in the heat of the day.  Menus will now be planned around the desire not to make the kitchen any warmer than it needs to be — and the fact that no one may want to eat a piping hot meal anyway.

My very skin seems to need a moment to habituate to the oppressive weight of the sweltering air.

Now is the moment when sweet, gentle spring hands over the seasonal baton to her more intense, melodramatic sister.  It certainly makes for some fireworks in the garden.

Asclepias tuberosa/butterfly weed, a favorite of the bees

Zinnia elegans "Zowie Yellow Flame"

Hypericum/St. John's Wort in bloom; seed pods in the background

Seed pods of St. John's Wort

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Of course, I’m storing up plenty of images and ideas for posts down the road, when the first glorious madness shall have passed.

For now I’ll give you a taste of yesterday, full of blossoms seen under an overcast sky.

Namasté, y’all!

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I’ve decided peas are a very strange crop.  For 2010, I’d decided to try growing peas in the kitchen garden as my new-to-me vegetable, and so far I’m not impressed.  Far from being “as easy to grow as beans,” as one seed catalog assured me, the peas are turning out to be some moody little slowpokes.

When I planted them back on February 3rd, I was sure I’d be eating peas in early April, based on the “days to maturity” numbers on the backs of the seed packets.  But those numbers begin to run only after the seeds have germinated.  Which took a long time.

And I mean a looooong time.

As of today, March 19th, 44 days and counting, about 10 of the regular garden peas are up, most of those 10 mere pinpoints of green barely visible in the soil.  We planted about 40, in two neat, innoculant-sprinkled, parallel lines on either side of the homemade pea fence, and the percentages are not encouraging.

What most of the pea seedlings look like.

Because the other area slated for peas had been severely damaged by the flash flooding, I planted the snap pea seed in the two enormous containers that held our purple-podded pole beans last year.   A handful of these are up as well, and looking kind of pitiful, frankly.

None of the ones in the front half of the container had come up, and so yesterday I determined that I would use that space for some lettuce transplants.  Imagine my surprise when the first thing the trowel turned up was three pea seedlings — still underground, yes, but within a centimeter or two of breaching the soil line.

“How long does it take you guys?” I asked these pale shoots.  They had no answer as I carefully covered them and let them get back to their excruciatingly slow work.

That means there are some peas which are planning to take longer than 45 days to germinate.  Does that blow your mind?

When my sister and I planted the seed, we noted that the days to germination were abnormally high, 17 to 20 days.  This lag effectively meant that my pea-planting window would close here before I knew if the seeds had taken, since planting after February 15th meant the poor things would be struggling to produce anything just as our late spring heat and humidity ramps up to normal range.  No resowing  would be possible if they didn’t sprout.

Now I understood why people chit (or presprout) their pea seed ahead of time, and that is probably what I would do if I decide to try growing again.  Granddaddy did not seem to think it necessary — but then, he’d be growing a field of peas, not a couple of rows, and even he admitted this spring has been plagued by weird weather.

We’ve had abnormally cool spring temperatures in this part of South Carolina.   Add in the usual seasonal rains, plus a few of flash-flood-level intensity, a surfeit of cloudy days, and I have reason to suspect the poor peas’ response to the chilled, soggy soil is not what one would expect in a typical year.

So much for eating peas by April….

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