Tasha Tuesday

Tasha continues to help me in the garden. She's there when I water, when I weed, and when I harvest. Her duties are limited to barking and running around. I'm grateful because my barking and running around skills are not what they used to be.

More and more tomatoes are ripening. Tasha barks to remind me.

I can feel the summer slipping away. The days are noticeably shorter; we lose a few minutes of light every day now. Apples are falling from the trees (just the apple trees). The morning lows are dipping lower and the afternoon highs are not as high as they were. The equinox is less than three weeks away.

Before and after

There has been so little rain that I haven't had to cut the grass much this year. It had been fifty-eight days, nearly two months, since the last cut when I got the new mower out there on Saturday. I would have cut a week earlier if the old mower hadn't broken down.

Before: a bright sunny and hot day in the west 40 before I cut the weeds.

As you can see in the "before" photo above, there's not much in the way of grass. The lawn is mostly weeds and wildflowers kept in check by mowing. When it's dry, certain of the weeds send up their flower stalks, especially the wild carrot (Queen Anne's lace). It doesn't really look like it needs mowing until, at a certain point, it does.

After: almost the same shot, overcast and wet on Sunday, the day after I ran the new mower. Neat and tidy! Well, almost.

I was surprised at how much dust flew when I cut this time. The grass is burned to a crisp and there are many dead leaves and pine needles on the ground. The mower is a mulcher that pulverizes what it cuts; a cloud of dust followed me as I mowed. That wasn't too good for breathing, but I got through it. Now that it's rained again, I wonder how long it will be until the next cut?

The new mower

I'm saying good-bye to our eight-year old lawnmower. Some metal part that held one of the front wheels on sheared off and is beyond my ability to repair. Getting it repaired professionally is probably not worth the expense, given that other things will start going wrong anyway. Our first mower lasted eight years, and now the second has given us eight years.

I didn't think to take a picture before I used the mower, so it's a little dusty.

So we went shopping, first on line and then to a local hardware chain, and found this. It's the same brand as the other two. I put it together last week, but yesterday was the first time I used it to get a large section of the yard cleaned up. The mower works great. There are two things that are different from the previous models. There's one lever to change the cutting height so I don't have to adjust each wheel independently. The second difference is that it has rear-wheel drive instead of front-wheel drive. I have to get used to that.

Curious

The dirt road that goes through the vineyard parcels behind our house is full of curiosities. Every year, the town fills the potholes that form in the winter. The fill is mostly crushed stone, but there must be other things in it. I've seen glass, brick, and other materials that are not from nature exposed as the road wears down. This seems to be a hunk of concrete with some lettering molded in.

It's hard to tell what words these letters are part of.

We're having nice weather right now. Warm, not too hot, dry. But the weather people say that will change on Sunday with a drop in temperatures and weather system moving across the country from the northwest. There may even be some rain. At least we're not facing a hurricane, like they are in the southeastern US.

Here come the beans

In the spring I planted a row of yellow flat beans along the garden's trellis. They sprouted quickly and started climbing, but then they slowed down. I suspect that the heat waves had something to do with that. But a week or so ago I noticed blossoms, and now the beans are forming.

The beans are getting bigger and are starting to turn yellow.

I hope the crop is good, because we like flat beans. Green flat beans are usually available in the markets and they're really good. I wonder if this year's weather will have had any impact on the commercial crops.

Still producing

The zucchini are starting to pile up. I've got to process them and freeze them before they go soft. I guess we're not eating them fast enough, even though we seem to eat them almost daily. I like to grate them in the food processor and freeze them. Then, later in the year, I can thaw the grated squash for fritters or for zucchini bread.

I picked this one after I took the photo. I can see at least six more growing on this plant. Yikes!

Last year we had a bumper crop of potimarron, those red kuri squash that have a nice chestnutty taste. To preserve those, I roasted them and froze the flesh. There is still a lot of it in the freezer for making pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread this fall. I was smart enough not to grow any this year.

A stormy evening, a restless night

For about an hour last evening we experienced rain. Not a lot, but a steady mild rain with some rumbling thunder. We were on the edge of the storm because we consistently heard the thunder to our west as it moved northward. It was nice to get some rain, but it had stopped by nightfall and the stars came out in a mostly clear sky.

One of our roses is producing flowers again.

I had another bad night of sleep or, rather, lack of sleep. My legs will not calm down. The moment I lie down, my leg muscles tense up, just short of cramping. I constantly want to move them, stretch, or get up and walk around. It keeps me from falling asleep. I've read about "restless leg syndrome" and how nobody really knows what it is or how to deal with it. This has been going on for a long time, but it's been much worse in the past few months. I suppose I'll mention it to the doctor when I see him this fall, but I'm not certain what, if anything, can be done.