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I don't like Florida. I don't like the sand, nasty vegetation, heat, flat landscape, tasteless sweet corn, and sun-brown wrinkled old men going shirtless. I don't go to Florida if I can help it.
Florida weather, however, seems to have come to me, or at least, Florida-like high temps and daily afternoon rain showers.
I have to admit my garden likes it. Loves it. My tomato plants are growing like Jack's beanstalk. I dug my first potatoes Thursday. They're huge. Peas hang in clusters; my back aches from picking. We ate fresh beets three days ago. The kale has been ready to pick for a week. I'll be skillet-frying some tomorrow. Seasoned with salt and balsamic vinegar, that's goooood eating.
My first planting of sweet corn is tasseling. "Knee high by the Fourth of July?" Ha!
There is a downside. Weeds are growing as fast as my vegetables and the garden's usually too wet to cultivate. Pull a weed and it re-roots where you throw it.
If not Florida, this is at least Hoopie Southern West Virginia growing weather, the kind my cousins down in Lincoln County are used to, the kind they used to grow tobacco in. This is not normal Gas Valley Yankee Northern Panhandle West Virginia weather. This is even, maybe, earlier than Marietta tomato weather.
I don't know the what or the why, but I do know we've very quickly gotten used to this cycle of almost daily heat and rain.
My wife Honey watches storm blips as they march across the weather radar on her cellphone screen with the intensity of a handicapper watching thoroughbreds heading for the finish line.
"There's one little red dot. If it gets us, we'll go over an inch and a half for the past three days," she said.
Earlier in the week when we had two scorching, humid, sunny 90-degree days in a row without the usual shower, we began to panic. Last summer it seemed these pop-up storms always missed us.
"All my potted flowers are drooping. I water but it's not the same as rain," Honey said.
"I may have to start irrigating the garden," I replied, wincing at the thought of dragging out pumps and hose to water from the pond.
Then of course it did rain, and that made it too wet to cultivate again, so I pulled on my Carhartt Rugged Flex Mud Wellington muck boots and tromped through the garden mud to tie up my tomato plants. I have 84 and they threaten to outgrow their stakes.
Ahem, as for the boots I just name-dropped, I could never justify the retail cost ($125.52 from Amazon, marked down from $190) but I was happy to pick them up at a yard sale for $10: leather uppers and looked like they had never been worn. I resisted putting them on, they were so nice. Finally I bowed to the inevitable and now they're crusted in mud like my other boots. I feel sorry for all my boots, having the misfortune to be owned by me.
Remember last year? May and June were soakers and then we had no rain at all for six weeks in the heat of the summer. Are we going to get a drought like that again? In this kind of heat? Contrary to my expectations, we actually had a bumper crop for our pumpkin patch last fall. Apparently there was enough moisture in the ground to keep them going, and the drought suppressed weeds and insects. That's the theory.
Hancock County had its first-ever tornado a year ago in May, and two weeks ago the Wheeling area suffered first-ever multiple fatalities from flash flooding. For whatever reasons it is warmer than it used to be, and weather seems crazier, more extreme, more deadly. But is it? There have been a lot of extreme weather events in just our few hundred years of taking note of such things. Also, a lot more people reside where weather tends to be extreme, such as, not to pick on Florida, but yeah, Florida.
I don't have the answers to all that, but I do know I'll be tasting that first ripe tomato and my own sweet corn weeks earlier this year, thanks to what Florida-like rain and heat does to plants growing in good brown West Virginia topsoil.
Is it possible I'd be wearing my Carhartt Rugged Flex Mud Wellington muck boots when I pick them? Yes, quite.