Sounds like a strange news headline in some sci-fi novel; doesn’t it? Or maybe something by Kurt Vonnegut….
Today it’s raining again. The sky is dark gray again. The air feels cooler, but heavy and clammy with moisture, and I find myself yawning a lot — again.
I know I really shouldn’t be complaining. Especially after all my praying for rain in July. I was getting pretty desperate and remembering last year’s terrace-bound victory garden in downtown Atlanta. The one where nearly everything died in the record drought.
I stopped just short of doing an actual rain dance last month, and now I’m complaining about a week of steady drizzles interspersed with heavy downpours and blustery showers. But in my defense, such irregular weather is not ideal for the victory garden. A couple of the tomato plants have contracted black spot. I’ve lost squash and zucchini plants to mildew. Some eggplants fell over into the soil and rotted. I couldn’t get outside to harvest some things before they went beyond the edible stage.
Some of my precious heritage half-runner bean seed pods burst open when they got so wet for so long they figured it was time to send forth new plants. Directly from the drying pod still hanging on the vine.
Sigh. Some of them rotted or got covered in mold.
The photo ops are rather thin on the ground, to be honest.
This is a flower of cosmos ‘Bright Lights.’ You simply cannot fail with these seeds, they are so easy to grow. I did nothing to them. Zip. Zero. Nada. I put them here and there along the edges of the plantings to attract pollinators.
Almost every single one of my plants is orange. The color mix was supposed to include yellow and red, too. But I only got one yellow cosmos, and he’s kind of frail compared to his siblings, who churn out the orange blossoms crazy fast and often times get picked for a vase to go in my bathroom. (My bathroom is robin’s egg blue, and I love the color pairing of that blue with a touch of tangerine.)
Here’s a picture of some of my cosmos in a bottle. I think it’s the third photo down. Taken on a bright, sunny day, obviously.
Blech. I think it’s time for a nap.
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Organic gardening is definitely about changing your mindset. If two parasitic wasps can share a tiny flower and not fight over it, carefully dancing around one another for almost 20 minutes, then I can share my garden with the insect kingdom and the few animals and birds that are interested. And we can choose to share our planet and not take everything for the humans. If we continued on our present course, there wouldn’t be anything left for the humans, either, as at some point on this trajectory we shut down our life support systems. I don’t think we’re going to get there, though.
