At 10:58 this morning in the eastern US, the sun entered Cancer and summer began!
We have had the slowest, wettest, coolest spring in ages! The trees opened and blossomed at the usual time, but the plants have just waited patiently, more patiently than I!, for sunshine. I have written my tale o' woe about our plants, and it continued. The second planting of tomato plants look awful after waiting to go into the ground. The cukes we planted are all dead. The squash is hanging on. A couple of planted tomatoes "might" make it. And the basil looks pretty sickly. Just too cool, with way too little sun. The past few days the sun has COME BACK, and the flowers are happy, happy. The local farmers, both vegetable and flower, have had a hard time. Everything's late, but all should be fine now. Picked up strawberries today.
For supper I'll be making the first strawberry shortcake of the season.
Just before I wrote this post, I read the following in The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. Helene Hanff says:
Happy Summer! I love the books by Helene Hanff, you know I do! And strawberries in England are so good! Or was that because they served them to me with all that lovely cream? Glad your veggies are picking up. It was the same here in Georgia, it was such a cool, rainy Spring! Not as cool as yours though, I am sure! x
ReplyDeleteThat is how HH's were served. I greatly prefer whipped cream!
DeleteI am kind of amazed that you also had the same spring.
Love the quote about the strawberries. It's been summer here earlier than we like to see it, pretty much the exact opposite of your experience. The whole region has been under an unusually hot heat wave - unusual at this time of year for sure. Heat Index has approached, if not slightly exceeded, 110 degrees several times in the last few days. I was just on the phone with my granddaughter who lives in Dallas and is trying to get to a job interview only to find herself on flooded streets and in the middle of a downpour. There's a reasonable possibility that we get rain tomorrow, just hoping it's not flood material. But still, I do like this time of year. Happy Summer to you all.
ReplyDeleteWow. Downpours and 110 degrees. Texas is so big that it has all the different climates of a country!
DeleteYou just answered the question I had yesterday when I looked at my four basil plants and they looked so spindly. Last year they were loving that spot but this year bleah! Now I know why. Too cool weather here in Upper Valley, south of you.
ReplyDeleteMaybe they will come back with the sun. I sure hope so.
DeleteI recently enjoyed 84 Charing Cross Road after your'd posted about Hanff in a previous post. Love the book and movie. Oh, my garden is such a disaster this year. I had some beautiful tomatoes and trimmed the sucker branches one day, a few days later hornwroms were all over the plant. Stripped the branches and ate into some of the tomatoes. I was so discouraged.
ReplyDeleteYour strawberries look wonderful!
Awful, awful those da*% hornworms! Have you ever grown strawberries? We haven't. It has always seemed like so much work to plant the little offshoots, etc.
DeleteMy mother always had a great crop of strawberries but that was in Pennsylvania. I am in Florida, for my sins. I had thought of fencing the area I tried the vegetables but you can't fence against hornworms. One year we had such a wonderful crop of pole beans. Ought to try those again.
DeleteMy friends' allotment veggies aren't doing so well this year - I looked after their tomatoes when they were away for a week and they are doing OK in the greenhouse but the beans all got eaten. I have enjoyed their rhubarb and their berry bushes are looking good, however.
ReplyDeleteI love seeing the allotments on Gardeners' World. A wonderful concept. They may be in cities in this country, but I don't really know. As far as I know there aren't any gardening programs on television. I wonder who ate the beans?!
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