I think this time of year is almost busier than spring. Spring is all about planting and the start of the growing season, but I’ve had time all winter to plan for it. And while it is all weather dependent on when gardening begins, once it does, it goes along pretty well. If I don’t get the radishes planted one day, I can plant them in the next day or so. If the beans get planted a week later than I had planned, no big deal. This time of year though can’t be planned and is more labor intensive.

I can’t predict when the elderberries are going to be ripe, but when they are, I have to get to it. And after they are picked they must be dealt with immediately because if they are left to sit in a bucket for a couple of days, they start to go bad. And so it is that over the course of about two weeks, James and I have put four-and-a-half one-gallon bags of elderberries in the freezer to await the time when we can make them into jam.

And then last weekend the chokeberries/aronia started coming ripe. I picked about two pints and left another pint or so on the bush because they weren’t ripe. I didn’t get the time to pick them during the week, and when I went out Sunday morning many of them had gone past ripe and were headed to shriveled raisin-like territory. I managed to pick about a third of a pint that were still good and shared many of the shriveled ones with the chickens. These are all also washed and in the freezer, waiting for when we have time to make jam.

Because right now, we’ve got so much produce from our CSA box, James is in the kitchen making salsa, jars and jars of it. To add to the jars and jars we already have. And he’s also cutting and freezing a whole bunch of hot peppers that we parcel out a bit at a time, because even though we both grew up in California, neither of us like blow-your-head-off spicy. We like to be able to taste our food, so little bits get added here and there to things for some kick.

And then there’s all the corn. Since we don’t buy frozen corn from who-knows-where in plastic bags from the grocery in winter, we stock up on fresh local corn in season, cook it and freeze it. James has also saved a bunch of the cobs because I want to make corn jelly from them. Have never done that before and I am interested to find out what it tastes like. But the cobs are frozen, because no time to make the jelly right now.

‘Tis the season.

At the same time as all of this, there are still parts of the garden that need regular water because we are still in severe drought and currently in the midst of our second heatwave in two weeks. So far the late season sprouts are doing ok, and if they can hold on until Tuesday night when a cold front is forecast to arrive, we will drop from highs in the mid to upper 90sF to highs in the mid 70sF and have a decent chance of some rain.

The pole beans are ending their productiveness, but there’s usually a couple new beans to pick every day. And the growing pumpkin needs to be pepper sprayed about every other day. My squirrels must like things spicy because there are so many tooth marks on the outside shell. The pumpkin is a solid green still, not even close to being ripe. Squirrels don’t care though, they’d rip it open and leave it ruined when they figure out it isn’t ripe.

And guess what? The zucchinis finally got their male and female flower production coordinated and I actually have two getting visibly larger on the daily, and a few more that look like they may also have been pollinated as well but I have to wait a couple days to see if that is the case.

As if all that isn’t enough, it’s seed saving time too. I’m clipping bean pods and black-eyed peas as they dry. And my desk has turned into seed sorting central and it won’t be cleared for many weeks yet because there will be marigold and zinnia seeds to add and probably some radish seeds too. And, I hope, zucchini and pumpkin seeds.

In addition to all that, I am rethinking the layout of the garden and starting to change the bed configurations as I can. Currently we have four garden quadrants each with a wavy bed like an M or W with curves instead of points. We’ve decided that while this is a good way to use space, it is inefficient. And so I’m in the process of measuring out four-foot wide beds and 1 1/2 foot wide paths the length of the garden. But things being what they are, these will not be regimentally perfect because there is a tree and some berry shrubs and a bed of walking onions that call for slight adjustments. And as I’m shifting beds and paths, I am putting down fresh woodchips hauled on the cargo bike from the city’s free woodchip pile at the lake a few block from my house.

Good times!

I startled an invader rabbit in a wild mess of arugula the other day. The rabbit, thankfully, bolted out of the garden the same way they came in—a little space where the wire fencing had come away. James got that fixed up in a hurry. But the next night I woke up from a nightmare in which I dreamt a whole bunch of rabbits had invaded the garden and eaten everything. And I had a hard time going back to sleep afterwards because I couldn’t convince myself that it wasn’t true.

With the heat and drought our tofu dish watering hole is getting lots of action. Squirrels and birds, birds, birds, but also we had a raccoon visit who unkindly tipped the dish over and tossed it across the deck in the middle of the night. And a few times now while having lunch or dinner, I have looked up to see a tiny brown field mouse with big round ears perched on the edge of the dish. It’s pretty amazing to me how all of these critters have managed to find the dish.

As the end of August approached I had some melancholy moments over the waning summer. And now we’ve had two record-breaking heatwaves, the ragweed pollen counts are off the charts, and all of the late season garden things need to be taken care of. Suddenly I am anticipating fall, and looking forward to the season of cold and hibernation and rest. This happens to me about the same time every year. When I’m melancholy I wish the growing season would never end. And then, wham! I’m in a near constant rush of all the things and getting more and more tired by the week, and golly, I can’t wait for it all to finally be done. This, I’m convinced, is Nature’s way of getting me ready and making me feel just fine about the cold, short days of the coming winter.

I’m already thinking about projects because, guess what? I bought a loom! I got a 25-inch Schacht Flip Loom—affectionately called Flip—that I hauled home all boxed up on my cargo bike from the Weaver’s Guild last weekend. I spent the week looking for kitchen towel patterns for James. I found that there are lots of towel patterns but none of them are exactly what I want, and so I have to design my own with the help of the patterns I looked at.

I’m going to do this right, I decided, and keep a weaving project journal. I have a couple of blank journals but I like lined journals for writing in, which is no good for a weaving journal when I want to draw a plan and all that. So I found I still had a pretty little unlined journal handmade by the lovely and talented Iliana. The binding is made so it can lie open flat. Perfect!

I had to clear everything off my sewing table and put in the extra leaf and the loom just fits on it width-wise. I’ve got my math sorted for how big and wide I want the towels, accounted for hems and shrink and loom waste (sadly there is always loom waste), and figured out what kind of pattern I want and how to warp the colors for it. The next step is to warp the loom. Wish me luck!

Reading

• Book: Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng. This is a terrifyingly good book in the vein of The Handmaid’s Tale in that Ng used only things that have actually happened—children taken from families to re-educate them, book banning, surveillance, anti-Asian hate—and put it into a story about a boy called Bird who is looking for his mother whose poem “Our Missing Hearts” became the anthem for the protest movement against PACT—Preserving American Culture and Traditions—a sort of PATRIOT Act on steroids. Bird’s mother has been in hiding for years, and now twelve-years-old, he aims to find her.
• Article: Why have you read ‘The Great Gatsby’ but not Ursula Parrot’s ‘Ex-Wife’? Parrot’s book was a bestseller in 1929. The story is about a 24-year-old woman whose husband divorces her. She gets a job in New York and learns how to make her way in the world as a divorced woman. Thankfully I have several libraries in my area with this book in their holdings. I’m hoping to borrow it sometime this winter.

Listening

• Podcast: Crazy Town: The Elon Musk Episode about Elon Musk Brought to you by Elon Musk. This paired nicely with…
• Podcast: Movement Memos: Rocket-Launching Billionaires Promise a New Pie in the Sky. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, author of Astrotopia, talks about how Musk and Bezos are peddling a new age religious drama of disaster and salvation. After listening to this I brought home Rubenstein’s book from the library and I’m just getting started on it.

Watching

• Movie: The Banshees of Inisherin. Really good, but very sad. Also, for some reason it took me half the movie to remember Brendan Gleeson’s character was called Colm, so I kept referring to him an Mad-Eye Moody.

Quote

It is hard for anything to be heard and even if anyone hears it, how much of a difference could it really make, what change could it possibly bring, just these words, just this thing that happened once to one person that the listener does not and will never know. It is just a story. It is only words.

She does not know if it will make a difference. She does not know if anyone is listening…

But still: she turns another page and goes on.

Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

Three hummus flavors, beet and chickpea, plain chickpea, and spicy (cayenne and salsa) beet and chickpea with heart-shaped pita bread.