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Summer officially came in last Thursday with 95-degree days and my anxious eyes on the weather radar, hoping one of those red or yellow or even green blobs would veer over Gas Valley and bless my parched garden.
"Two-tenths of an inch," Honey hollered, reporting from the rain gauge after one heavy but all-too-brief downpour.
These are three-shower days for me, "shower" in the sense of an overhead spray of water from our plumbing, washing off prodigious garden dirt and sweat. I turn the water temp down to lukewarm, and sometimes to cold at the end to close those pores, and open my mouth to drink some, too. I need a shower before lunch beforeI can sit on the furniture, another when I come in for dinner and the third when I drag in at dark.
I'm unbelievably clean at the end of a three-shower day.
I'm a bit lighter, too, at the end of a three-shower da, according to the bathroom scales. I know it's partly dehydration, but the needle on my old Health-O-Meter scale stops at 10 pounds below my winter weight. Reporting for work in my garden in the cool of the morning, I breakfast on whatever's ready: red raspberries and sugar snap peas at the moment, cherry tomatoes, green beans and broccoli soon. More important, if I'm working in the garden I'm not sitting in my recliner with a snack.
When I do get to my recliner these days, I fall asleep.
The three youngest grandsons - Lamppost Head, The Favorite and The 747 - are partners in Worshrag's Pumpkin Patch this season, Bob having aged out of the seasonal business at 16 to start his own lawnmowing service. I laid plastic mulch in the pumpkin fields as per usual, and the boys worked with me to plant seeds in it for all the stuff we sell in the fall: squash, gourds, and 20 or so varieties of pumpkins. Indian corn and broom corn we planted in a long cultivated field which will do double-duty as cover for shooters in what will be the First Doc Bahnsen Memorial Dove Shoot this coming Labor Day.
I laid plastic much for all the pumpkins, but this spring I made a decision not to use it in my garden.
One reason, and it's a big one, is that warmer spring temperatures have allowed me to plant earlier in my garden the past couple of years, as early as I can work the soil to get in peas, potatoes, onions and an early sweet corn. Memorial Day used to be our garden-planting weekend. Now that's about when I trellis the snow peas.
Late April, however, is too early to put in pumpkins, and I don't want to borrow Good Neighbor Dan's plastic mulch plow twice.
In my recent garden column on the Seven Secrets of Hoeing, you may recall the seventh and final rule was: "Do Everything at the Right Time."
This year I waited until after a good rain to lay the plastic mulch, ensuring that the pumpkin seeds we planted would find themselves not in dry dust under plastic, but in a lovely moist environment to germinate. It worked beautifully.
There is another reason I forswore plastic mulch in my vegetable garden this year: I missed the dirt. I guess I'm just an old-fashioned gardener who likes to till the soil, hoe and hill dirt around my plants, in rows just wide enough to get through with my Troy-bilt "Horse" tiller.
When those elusive storm blips failed to find us for too many days, I lugged the two-inch trash pump out of the barn and set it up by the pond. The boys helped me piece together my leaky, patched-up sections of hose, and we gave the garden a two-hour drink, carrying buckets to water plants where the hose wouldn't reach. With leaks sending up fountains here and there, and sections of hose constantly coming apart, we were all soaked and perfectly cool despite the 90-some degrees.
There are showers and then there are showers on these three-shower garden days.