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| Dames Rocket |
Two more beautiful, sunny, warm, shorts-and-flip-flops summer days this week, one at an old fashion picnic at a local colony family farm with watermelon and lemonade and fresh from the garden salads, ladies in sun bonnets, marveling at the old trees and bushes planted ages ago, the other in our garden soaking the rare heat into my bones. I’m sitting on the garden bench wrapped in the delicious perfume of Dames Rocket blooming all around me watching summer hurtle by on fast forward. I’m catching my breath from running to keep up. Don’t know how the summer solstice got away with me hardly taking time to notice let alone celebrate and already we are three weeks on the down side. The midnight sun still lights up the wetlands in a golden glow only its much earlier now. You don’t have to wait up to see it. The robins have stopped waking me at three in the morning with their perky here-comes-the-sun singing. We keep getting served notice that summer will soon be winding down. The billboard at the highschool announces football practice to start next week, the L.L. Bean catalogue arrived labeled “Late Summer”. The State Fair, that end of summer harvest celebration, had its brochure in this Sunday’s News.
The garden seems to know the end is at hand. Everything that seemed to take so long to get started is bursting into bloom in rush to get done. I keep running to catch up always days even weeks behind. I felt really pleased to get the yellow columbine all staked and tidied until I realized the delphiniums should have been staked first. The’re at risk of collapsing any day now if I don’t tie them up fast. Ditto the thalictrum which seems to be on some super steroid standing 8 feet tall and filipendula rubra which only two days ago was neat and tidy and lured me in to thinking I had plenty of time to take care of them. I’ve tied back the yarrow and the foxglove and the asiatic lilies to keep them from falling into the garden path but the blue poppies and ligularia are also on super steroids so you have to walk sideways to get around them.
All of this while out in the vegetable garden two days of rain last week has produced a healthy crop of chickweed. I was pulling it out of the onion bed when I happened to catch site of the beets nearby. There they were , fat and tall, a good 4 to six inches out of the ground ready for harvest. I’m not even close to being ready to start pickling beets. First I have to get the honeyberries which keep screaming to be picked because we covered them with bird netting and I keep having to rescue robins who have some how found their way under the net and got caught. I thought I was doing good with cauliflower all harvested and broccoli in the freezer, but now kolrabi needs attention and if I don’t get some rhubarb cut and into the freezer we can say goodbye to any more strawberry rhubarb pie. What is summer without strawberry rhubarb pie.
Meanwhile the Kenai sockeye is looming on the horizon starting their run up the river.
It would be easer if the four seasons of summer in Alaska - gardening, fishing, hunting, harvesting- all stayed in their own slot but they all run together keeping us bouncing from one thing to another in between garden tours and BBQs and community picnics.
I look at those delphiniums and say wait, wait, slow down, but summer isn’t about to slow down and stick around for awhile. So I better keep my running shoes on and try to keep up with it.
