Please send heat

We're not freezing or anything like that. We are getting slightly mildewed, but with the Kärcher power-washer we can clean that off. It's raining again this morning and today's high temperature is supposed to be a less-than-scorching 72ºF — 22ºC. Au secours ! The French word for this kind of weather is maussade — grim.

Lettuce is still our best bet for 2012, garden-wise.

It's not so much our own persons that I'm worried about. We'll survive. I'm sure Callie is happy with this weather, even though you couldn't call it "dog days." Bertie seems to be doing fine, even though he's not crazy about going out hunting in the rain. It's supposed to rain here all day again today.

Tomato plants waiting to spring into action

Enough moaning. We just had three days in a row of no rain. Never mind that we were either either gray skies or being buffeted by gusty winds during all that time. The wind wasn't strong enough to damage plants in the garden, or trees, but the sun wasn't sufficiently bright and hot to encourage anything to grow much either.

The state of the vegetable garden in late June — still
much potential but not much punch yet.

The three dry days let us get the grass cut another time. I also gave us time to till up another garden plot and finally plant some squash, both summer and winter varieties. I guess it's good news that the repaired-and-serviced rototiller is running smoothly and doing its job. Planting summer squash this year is an act of great faith and optimism. Sometimes I feel like I'm back in San Francisco. The weather is that bad. The winter squash will surely do just fine.

A long row of peppers and eggplants, just biding their time

Blackberry brambles and "escaped" grapevines are threatening to pull down our fence and take over the yard. Ivy grows up tree trunks all around us. I spent a couple of hours out there yesterday with pruning shears (a.k.a. a secateur) cutting back what I could cut back, and getting scratches and puncture wounds from thorns on my arms and the backs of my hands.

Some cherries, at least

In my plundering and plodding, I discovered flowers that I hadn't yet noticed, and I can report two pieces of good news: the cherry tree out behind the garden shed has quite a few cherries on it, and one of the four apple trees actually has some small apples growing on it. And here I was thinking we wouldn't get any apples or cherries at all this year. By the way, the little pear tree has hundreds of pears on it.

A cactus flower, shyly

There's also been just enough sun and warmth for the cactus that CHM gave us years ago to produce a couple of yellow flowers. It's planted against a south-facing wall. The flowers only open up fully when the sun is bright and hot, and we are still expecting that to happen one day. Meantime, flowers there are.