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When the heat gets this bad... I can't even dislike it anymore. It's beyond any normal conditions and somehow that gives it a kind of purity. It's not a thunderstorm, it's a tornado; it's not a creek overflowing, it's a 50-year flood. It's the white flame. It's Extreme Weather. It slams into you when you leave a building, makes you weak as a baby, cooks your eyeballs, creeps under your clothes and into your muscles and organs. It doesn't just wilt the flowers, it wilts the trees.
110F is all the rage in heat indexes this year
The state of my balcony garden is about average for the time of year, I suppose: barely surviving. I've been so busy, it's been hard to water as consistently as I should, especially since I have to do it by hauling bucket after bucket from the bathtub tap out to the plant pots. But somehow, nothing has died of heat yet. The cosmos and mixed wildflowers were past prime already; one tomato plant, the marigolds, the tops of my daisies and half of the flat-leaved parsley have been denuded not by the drought but by an invisible insect. (I looked for the Horned Worm, but could not find the beast; it may be something else.) Nothing is actually growing; it's the mid-summer dormancy. I almost gave up on my cucumber vine, but then I remembered how my tomatoes recovered last fall and started producing again all the way into December, and I decided to try to keep the cucumber alive. Gardeners live in hope.
I have picked a couple of decent tomatoes from my plants, but my father's big garden on the farm is producing bushels. I've had a number of mouth-watering fresh tomato sandwiches. It's my all-time favorite sandwich, probably because it is only available for a very limited time and in specific conditions. The rarity makes it valuable. The only thing my sandwiches this year were missing was a couple of fresh basil leaves. I regretted not planting any basil. Then yesterday I went out to water yesterday and... discovered two tall, leggy basil plants growing alongside a tomato! They'd been neglected so long, they'd gone to flower, which was actually kind of pretty and reminds me that basil is in the same family as mint (Lamiaceae). I had forgotten them and neglected to pinch them because, I think, they were disguised by the lush, taller foliage of the tomato plant. But now that that plant is sadly leafless, the basil was able to catch my attention.
110F is all the rage in heat indexes this year
The state of my balcony garden is about average for the time of year, I suppose: barely surviving. I've been so busy, it's been hard to water as consistently as I should, especially since I have to do it by hauling bucket after bucket from the bathtub tap out to the plant pots. But somehow, nothing has died of heat yet. The cosmos and mixed wildflowers were past prime already; one tomato plant, the marigolds, the tops of my daisies and half of the flat-leaved parsley have been denuded not by the drought but by an invisible insect. (I looked for the Horned Worm, but could not find the beast; it may be something else.) Nothing is actually growing; it's the mid-summer dormancy. I almost gave up on my cucumber vine, but then I remembered how my tomatoes recovered last fall and started producing again all the way into December, and I decided to try to keep the cucumber alive. Gardeners live in hope.
I have picked a couple of decent tomatoes from my plants, but my father's big garden on the farm is producing bushels. I've had a number of mouth-watering fresh tomato sandwiches. It's my all-time favorite sandwich, probably because it is only available for a very limited time and in specific conditions. The rarity makes it valuable. The only thing my sandwiches this year were missing was a couple of fresh basil leaves. I regretted not planting any basil. Then yesterday I went out to water yesterday and... discovered two tall, leggy basil plants growing alongside a tomato! They'd been neglected so long, they'd gone to flower, which was actually kind of pretty and reminds me that basil is in the same family as mint (Lamiaceae). I had forgotten them and neglected to pinch them because, I think, they were disguised by the lush, taller foliage of the tomato plant. But now that that plant is sadly leafless, the basil was able to catch my attention.