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Rushing the Seasons

July 25, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I don’t like rushing the seasons. Instead, I try my best to get through the most trying days, even if only to remind myself that in just a few months, I’ll be complaining about the cold. But we’re in a sizzling hot spell, several days over 100 in a row, with the apex tomorrow at 109. Eek. It’s not that much of a problem, actually, since I do have a roof over my head and a way to keep the house — and me — cool, but still, those temperatures make even early morning chores a challenge. And, too, I can’t use open windows as a way to cool down the house in the evening because around here, at this time of year, it doesn’t cool down much until close to midnight.

I have to admit, that while I was hoping to bypass such temperatures this year since we had an early onslaught of summer (sometimes that’s an indication of an early cool down), stretches of more than 100 degrees are not at all uncommon. And anyway, although we’ve been in the 90s for weeks, we’ve only blipped into the 100s a couple of times. I do think this spate of sizzling weather is coming later this year than normal, but it’s hard to remember. Hot is hot.

For the next few days especially, I’ll do what I can to make my outside chores easier. It helps that so many of the summer flowers are through (or almost through) blooming. There are still a few lilies, a few echinacea, a few marigolds starting (which I don’t like particularly, but they love it here), and the petunias, of course, but for the most part, there’s not a lot to see out there except one heck of a lot of work I’m not doing.

One thing that is going strong enough to celebrate is my pumpkin vine. I just wanted the vine (ten feet long right now!) since I had a huge area to cover quickly, but still, a couple of the blossoms are turning into fruits. (Pumpkin is considered a fruit because it develops from the flowering part of the plant; it’s treated like a vegetable, but technically it’s a type of berry. Odd, that.)

Despite my claim of not liking to rush the seasons, I’d just as soon skip over the next week. Still, since there’s no choice, I’ll sweat it out (literally and figuratively), and hope that my grass, my flowers and I all survive the blast of heat.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, gardening, life. Tags: 109 degrees, fruit or vegetable, heat wave, planting one pumpkin, pumpkin is a berry, surviving the heat. 2 Comments »

My Back Forty

July 17, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Usually at this time of year, my “back forty” is lying fallow. It’s really a “back twenty” — an area about twenty feet by ten feet, but who’s counting. Almost everything I ever planted back there has died off except for a couple of plum trees I planted a few years ago, which in six years have produced a grand total of four plums. The plants that were here when I bought the place are still going strong — a wild rose, a honeysuckle, and a trumpet vine, but those plants are obviously well adapted to their environment. I think it gets too hot in that section for most plants, with the sun reflecting off the white garage next door and then kept sandwiched in between the two garages. In the spring, the area is lush with larkspur, but once I harvest the seeds and clean out the dead stalks, I just let it be. It just never seemed worth trying to grow anything.

Last year, I’d planted a tomato plant, a pumpkin vine, a watermelon vine, and a cantaloupe vine in my raised garden, and those four plants so overwhelmed the relatively small garden that this year I decided to try planting them in my back section, thinking they’d have plenty of room to grow. And they are doing supremely well! Perhaps the trees have grown enough to provide a bit of shade, but whatever the reason, I’m delighted.

I transplanted self-planted marigolds from the raised garden to provide a bit of protection for my “farm garden.” (If four plants can be considered a garden, let alone a farm garden.) I also threw out some wildflower seeds I’d been gifted, and though in previous years, nothing ever came of the wildflowers, this year they are adding to the lushness of the area.

Going by old blog posts I’d written around this same time, this is usually a discouraging time for me. Not only are the heat and humidity hard to bear, but they deplete my energy and my desire to do anything. (I know you people who live in truly high humidity will laugh at my thinking that 40% is high, but when you are used to single digit humidity, that is a huge change. And anyway, that’s just the afternoon humidity — the early morning humidity gets close to 80%.) This year, although the heat and humidity are playing with me, I am managing to keep up a semblance of enthusiasm for the yard, and I tend to think it has to do with that back twenty. With those vines growing so long (the pumpkin vine is at least ten feet long right now, though the others are catching up), they are easily filling the area with a lot of green and some luscious blossoms.

There seem to be many pumpkins starting to grow, but oddly, that wasn’t my main reason for planting them. And anyway, I have no idea what to do with the pumpkings once they’re big enough to eat.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, gardening, home, photography. Tags: back forty, cantaloupe plant, larkspur, planting one pumpkin, planting one watermelon, planting pumpkins, watermelon plant. 2 Comments »

Being Snippy

June 9, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I took a day off to recuperate from working too long in my yard two days running, but I went to town with a friend and ended up buying more plants, mostly plants for my “farm” garden rather than my flower garden, though I did buy one dianthus to fill in a blank space in one garden.

So, of course I spent yesterday planting all those new starts, not just the dianthus, but one pumpkin, one tomato, one watermelon, one cantaloupe. Sounds silly written out like that, but I don’t eat much of any of those things so one plant each should do it. Besides, the main reason to get those particular plants is that they take up a lot of room, and I have a back section of my yard that screams for green. I want to see if those vines with their pretty flowers will fill the area as I hope. And who knows, I might get an edible treat or two out of the deal.

There are several plants, mostly the cottage pinks, that are overgrown, and I’ve just let them go. I have a really hard time gathering the ruthlessness necessary to do such hatchet jobs, so I wait until I have a lot of aggression I want to bleed out. Well, yesterday I was feeling snippy in the meaning of short-tempered and irritable, so I got out my pruning shears and, closing my ears to their silent screams, snipped away as much of those poor plants as I could. I was going to wait until they went to seed, but apparently yesterday was the day I needed to get rid of some aggression.

I’m not sure why I was so disgruntled — well, I certainly spend too much time paying attention to what’s going on in the world as if it were a thriller I was reading in real time, and that makes me worry too much about things I have no control over, and for sure I’ve been stiff and sore after working so much.

Apparently, my revenge on my poor body for giving me grief is to give it even more grief because yesterday, once again, I overdid it. With any luck (and a bit of discipline) I might manage to take it easy today, only watering my newly planted gardens and closing my eyes to the work still to be done.

One benefit of having been so ruthless yesterday is that I was able to clear out around the daisies. And oh, aren’t they glorious! I might even snip off a flower or two to liven my kitchen.

Sometimes being snippy is a good thing.