Summer Solstice

It's the longest day of the year! I love the irony that this, the inaugural day of summer and the hottest months of the year, also ushers in the start of shorter days. Granted, it will be several months before the lazy late nights shift significantly earlier, but after today it's all downhill until the winter solstice.

The full moon of June, which was on the 9th, is the Strawberry Moon, because this is the month strawberries start to ripen. I got my first real harvest (other than one or two here and there) a few days ago. Aren't they lovely?

Yeah, so they vary in size from a pea to a large grape, but that's okay. They are nothing like the strawberries available in the store, but they're sweet and delicious and the beauty of a small patch is that there's nothing to be done with them besides eat them straightaway.

Most of the spring flowers have faded off; my pretty yellow bushes have turned to green, the purple spikes of the salvia are temporarily exhausted (they'll be back in a few weeks), and the sage and thyme are finished blooming too. Next up will be the daisy I bought last year at the end of the season - which promptly died, but is coming back nicely - and with any luck, the lilies I planted three years ago. I keep getting plenty of healthy green stalks and no flowers whatsoever. In a fit of annoyance last week I told them that if they don't flower this year I'm yanking them all out to replace them with something that will give some summer color! I don't even remember what color these were supposed to be!

I may or may not follow through on that. I feel guilty pulling up plants; I pulled out the anemic and perpetually diseased rose bushes early in spring, and felt bad the whole time I was hacking at the four-inch-thick roots with my spade (I really need to invest in more garden tools, this was not really the tool for this task). My mother told me my grandmother used to talk to her plants - and she had a zillion of them, all over the house, racks on the patio, a huge Florida yard full of mango trees and other exotic flora I don't really remember - and that she swore by this as a part of their care.

I do this too. I like to chat with them as I'm watering them every week, checking out their leaves and the state they're in. Plant care seems to have skipped a generation from my grandmother to me - my mother rarely had real plants in the house, she preferred the plastic ones. To this day I'm not sure if she had a black thumb or if she just didn't like the idea of the bugs they can bring into the house. She was a bit of a clean freak.

Just a hunch. 

No plastic plants for me! To be fair, I have seen plenty of plants to an early death. I transplanted my parsley that lived a nice quiet life in my kitchen window out into the garden a few weeks ago, and it was thriving, until a couple of days ago when all the leaves mysteriously disappeared. I think I know the culprit on that one though. -->

The lavender is blooming earlier than I remember as being "usual," so I've pulled a few bunches to dry for later use. They are messy bushes but I love them.

Summer has begun and it's time for the heat. I am not, personally, a fan. If I had my druthers (what a great phrase, we really need to bring back some of those old phrases) it would never get above 75. Alas, Gaia does as she sees fit and cares not for my personal comfort zone.

Happy Solstice and may you all have a beautiful summer.

Second Harvest

Around the first of August we celebrate the second harvest. Wiccans call it Lammas or Lughnasadh (pronounced 'Lu-ness-a'), in honor of the Irish god Lugh. It's the height of summer, the crops are coming in, and it's time to celebrate the bounty of the growing season. 

My tomatoes started ripening a couple of weeks ago. From here until first frost, I'll have some nearly every day. I grew almost all bite-sized tomatoes this year - grape, tiny orange, yellow pear, and cherry. I think I like the orange cherries the best; they have such a delicious sweetness. But I especially love how colorful it all is in the basket. 

And a single, minuscule green pepper. Peppers don't seem to love my garden.

I have three pepper plants this year: jalapeno, banana pepper, and green. The green pepper has given me only the one sad little specimen you see in the photo. I've tried to grow them three years straight and this is, sadly, the best I've done. 

However, the jalapenos are doing well, and I've already picked a number of banana peppers. I've never grown them before and I rarely even eat them outside of Subway sandwiches, so the first time I chopped some raw into a salad I was dismayed at how weird and bitter they tasted. Then I found a recipe for pickled banana peppers, and all has been right with the world. 

I grow zucchini every year. This year and last, I mixed it up with a yellow crookneck squash plant as well. A couple of years ago a friend asked, "How do you grow zucchini?" and I could only reply in amazement, "You plant it in the ground." I am inundated with squash every year. Zucchini omelettes, zucchini brownies, zucchini cake, zucchini quiche, zucchini casserole, a gajillion versions of zucchini bread both savory and sweet. Zucchini shredded and frozen for the indeterminate point in mid-winter when I'm ready to eat something with it again. 

This year, though, I haven't seen much from my famously prolific squash plants. Hopefully they'll start to give me more as the month wears on. It is definitely still summer: a couple of beautifully cooler days over the weekend gave way today to the sunny 90s. 

I'm glad of it, really. I am not a fan of the summer heat and autumn has always been my favorite season, in large part because of the relief it brings with crispy nights and cooler days. But in the last couple of years, the crushing drought and heat seems to have tempered back into the summers I remember from my youth: hot, yes, but not the oppressive Arizona-desert, get-thyself-indoors hot we had for what seems like fifteen or twenty years running.  And because it's been warm but not horrible, I find myself sad to realize that summer is coming to an end. 

Not yet, though! For now, the veggies are bursting and the sun is shining and the grass is...well... dead. But it's quite obvious, now, that the days are shortening and the seasons are turning. Autumn is coming. 

(Fair warning: I started watching Game of Thrones. I'll try not to quote it excessively.)

And now, this picture of kittens. 

Cuteness overload!