I’m back

It’s been two months since my last post. It’s been a difficult summer for various reasons and I’ve lacked the motivation to write.

It feels oddly like early fall, despite August usually being one of the hottest months of the year. I can already see the leaves changing. My pear trees — after two summers of no fruit — are bursting.

Blackberry season seems to be winding down. It seems early. I have a gallon-sized freezer bag full of berries. Our first summer here, I filled two bags.

At least I have everbearing strawberries. My new strawberry patch filled out nicely and is now producing fruit. I want to put in a second strawberry patch next year.

I am buried in cherry tomatoes. I’ve been dehydrating them and also freezing them in various forms.

Once again, my flower garden is a disaster. Until I get the weeds under control, it always will be. Most of the seeds I sowed didn’t even come up. I had one sunflower this year, even though I planted an entire packet of seeds. And that was from spilled bird seed. I had one daisy from an entire packet of mixed daisy seeds. And just a few zinnias from multiple packs of zinnia seeds that I saved from previous years. I don’t know what’s going on. I also sowed strawflowers and not a single one sprouted.

I’m used to having a variety of flowers I can cut for bouquets all summer. It’s been a bad year for that.

I need to sow more lettuce, mustard greens, and spinach tomorrow. Fall crops!

We got back yesterday afternoon from a road trip to Minnesota. L’s grandma died on August 1 at the age of 103, and we took the travel-trailer and stayed at a campground in his hometown. Blitz came with us since he can no longer be boarded. He behaved just fine on the trip, but he was clearly stressed. He has stress-induced colitis, and it flared up.