The onset of August

Jill Severn portrait

This is the month often known as the dog days of summer – a time of heat, lassitude, and crowded beaches.

It’s a month of ups and downs for gardeners. Vegetable gardens are overflowing with arugula, beets, broccoli, basil, cucumbers, collards, carrots and the rest of the vegetable alphabet all the way to zucchini. The best (or luckiest) gardeners may already have ripe tomatoes. Asters and hibiscus are just beginning to bloom, causing wild bee parties.

Also, in case you hadn’t noticed, the natural world in our home territory is spectacular right now.

But on the downside, nearly all of the lettuce has gone to seed, and a lot of perennials are exhausted, bloomed out, and disheveled.  There are limits to how long you can prolong a plant’s blooming by removing the spent blossoms – limits of time and energy, both yours and theirs.

The days are getting shorter, but the weeds are getting taller. Our gardens just won’t give us a rest. Seventy-five percent of us (I just made that number up) are not winning at weeding right now. Something always needs to be watered. At an election night party, a friend lamented that even now, when life is supposed to be easy, he can’t keep up with his garden. Worse yet, deer ate his gladiolas just as they were beginning to bloom.

This is also the time of maximum angst about damage from insects, slugs (even when it’s hot!), puzzling plant diseases, and fungus and mildew outbreaks.

There are also complaints about overabundance. Whole neighborhoods are getting tired of zucchini.

Then there’s the weather. The first week of August delivered a day over 90 degrees, raising fear of even more heat. It’s possible that the rest of the month might be hotter, though the National Weather Service doesn’t think so at the moment, and it is quite likely to continue to be dry. We may see more wildfire smoke. Right now, the smoke is staying in the upper atmosphere and won’t ruin our ground-level air quality, but we fear it will get worse.

On balance, though, we can’t complain: unlike other parts of the world, we don’t live in fear of hurricanes, tornadoes, prolonged power outages or floods.

But we complain anyway, about the weather, our bedraggled flowers, and our sudden realization that summer won’t last forever – fact of life over which we have no control. It throws a lot of gardeners and garden-adjacent people off balance.

To recover our balance, it helps to acknowledge that gardening involves a different sense of time than our daily routines. Gardening moves in the annual unspooling of seasons, not in schedules. In early August, we feel summer starting to slip away when we close the curtains at 9 p.m. instead of 9:30. On the trail, there are already a few crisp yellow, orange and brown leaves on the ground, and in some places, the fireweed has already bloomed out. Ads for back-to-school sales repeat the same message. The end of summer is near.

But it’s not very near; there is still more summer to come. In the next few weeks, we’ll be wallowing in ripe tomatoes and eggplant. The maladies of our gardens will mostly pass. We’ll enjoy the long blooming season of asters, hibiscus, and hydrangeas. And if we take the time to watch them, maybe we’ll learn to identify at least some of the bee species they attract.

It’s a fool’s misery to feel more than a passing regret about our weeds, our spent flowers, our bugs, or our shrinking daylight.

Time passes. If it didn’t, we’d be stuck in a single moment forever. In this garden year, which moment would you want that to be? The sunny spring day the first tulips opened? The June morning when you were watering and a hummingbird came and danced in the spray? Was it the evening you served the first picking of sugar snap peas at dinner?

Or maybe it would be this moment, when you are savoring the memories of your best garden experiences of the year so far. Memories last through all the seasons.

So . . . make August memorable.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers, and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com