Good morning, and another harbinger of fall is upon us. Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
In Denver, the heat has continued to abate; for only one day this week did the high creep into the low 90s, staying in the 80s for the rest of the week.
And at night, the air cools rapidly as the sun sets earlier, and the overnight lows are consistently dipping down to the upper 50s. Soon we'll trust enough in the coolness to remove the baby air conditioner from the bedroom window, as it hasn't been used for several nights this week.
School starts for Younger Son next week; college classes started for Elder Son this past week.
And yesterday afternoon I saw the first open blossom on the sweet autumn clematis.
Yes, summer is waning.
I've been anxiously watching the melons in the garden, waiting for one to ripen; this is a green nutmeg melon, reported to have a "spicy" flavor. I also planted French Charentais cantaloupe, but haven't discovered any large enough to see under the vast mounds of vine sprawled amongst the raccoon-toppled sweet corn stalks. Which is not unusual — last year I was constantly surprised to stumble across almost-ripe melons that I would have sworn hadn't been there two days earlier.
My only problem with growing melons is that they take so damned long to ripen. Next year I'm going to start the melons really, really early; maybe that way I can get some ripe before the end of August.
With all that's been going on this summer, I neglected ordering my hyacinth bulbs for forcing — that's on the to-do list this weekend. The cooler weather also means its time to over-seed the grass to fill in the fungus-killed spots. When I over-seeded last year, I think I did it a bit too late, and it was too cool for the seed to germinate well. This year I want to have the grass well-started before the snow flies, and the weather has been so whacky the last couple of years I don't want to even try and guess when that will be. Will we have the first freeze in September, or late November?
I also stumbled over one of the hazards of growing older this week: finding new and surprisingly unexciting ways to injure myself.
I'm not quite sure what it is I hurt. I had stopped at Sam's Club on the way home to get a couple of things for the office. I wheeled the over-sized shopping cart up to the conveyer belt; and leaned over the handle of the cart to reach into the cart and grab a package of paper when… something slipped? I dunno — suddenly there was a tremendous amount of pain where the rounded handle of the cart seems to have slipped in between my ribs — I guess it pulled a muscle. All I know now is that it's slowly getting better, although it hurts to breathe too deeply, or to sneeze — and although it doesn't bother me much during the day, after a few hours of sleep it starts to tighten up to where rolling over hurts enough to wake me up — generally about 2:00 a.m. But it is getting better… slowly.
And I won't be doing any vigorous weeding for a while.
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your gardens?