The Dregs Of Summer

If you spend a lot of time outside you can undoubtedly feel on your skin, or in your nostrils, the very day when the season begins to change, when winter softens into spring, or spring hardens into summer.  It was yesterday I could sense on the wind the approach of Fall.  The air had a different texture, the sun had a different feel. 

The dregs of summer are all that remains.  The roses are monsterous tall, and need a whack back for a successful autumn:

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The tomato plants are pulled, and it's time to add compost to the beds for cool-season crops:

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The pumpkins are ripened and the plants are dying, which is about as conventionally Autumnal as it ever looks here, except for Halloween decorations:




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Finally at long last the rest of the tomatoes are set on dry clean cardboard to ripen if they can.  Even picked green and reddened off the plant, they have more flavor than the store-bought kind.

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It was a tough summer for the Koi, because it wasn't much of a summer.  The water hung at about 68F and didn't warm up until this past week.   They're okay, but it was the one and only drawback of a cooler-than-normal summer.

8/30/2010

In the nearby field they still grow strawberries because the neighboring housing tract won't allow a grocery store to be built.   The property owner rents it out to a grower.  He's trying to wait out the homeowners and get his grocery store built, and the homeowners are trying to wait out the property owner.  In the meantime, truly local strawberries and corn to buy, and the crows glean the soil between crops, the soil still breathes and lives, not yet entombed in asphalt. 

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In colder climates  the end of summer signals the growing season's end.  Here it signals the beginning of the autumn growing season.  It's not an end, merely a road with a bend.   Many more flowers ahead. 

8/30/2010

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