It's Too Hot

...to do most anything. “Forty” is NOT a word I want to hear in a weather forecast.

Oh well. No deep thinking today folks. I’m sitting in the shade on my deck. I’ll take you for a slow walk around. This is what I’m seeing from my lovely wicker rocker:

I share this space with my houseplants, brought outside to enjoy the summer air and light. The Christmas cactus is thriving. It may have doubled in size. All my spider plants are happily producing babies. And the snake plant actually has THREE flower stalks growing amidst those hard green leaves that I faithfully ignored and withheld water for three months last winter (the secret to getting them to bloom I’ve read).

One step down is my salad garden with lettuces, parsley, kale, dill, cucumbers, thyme and oregano. Blooms and aromas abound in this mostly shady spot.

The birdbath garden is a busy place. Squirrels, chipmunks come to drink along with all the birds. The birds don’t care. As long as there’s space and time and fresh water for their them. Robins keep the shasta daisies watered with all their splashing, and I must get up from time to time to keep the bath refilled.

Zinnias, petunias, salvia, coleus, day lilies, snap dragons and various unnamed annuals collected from the end-of-season-will-you-give-us-a-home tables at the nurseries, the garden centres, the grocery stores all blooming happily and not minding the heat at all.

Off to my right is another aromantic corner. There’s a pot of basil and a beautiful happy lovage that I must keep pruned or it would be six feet tall. (I did let it go one season just to see: six feet is where I drew the line.) So all this pruning releases its lovely celery aroma, alongside the lemon balm that happily shares its bed.

There’s raspberry patch just there, beside the garden steps. Not a good spot for it as it doesn’t really get enough sun and it’s hard to reach. But never mind, The chipmunks love to climb up the canes and harvest the garden candy it produces for them. And on the other side of the step is the prickly pear garden. This plant followed us from another house to this little hillside where it is so happy it makes copious new paddles and has decided to reward us with blooms! So we keep it and avoid touching any part of that garden. It can inject its nasty little prickles even inside what felt like the most impermeable glove. But leave it alone and it will do amazing things. (Prickly pear is a cactus that is, in fact, native in this part of Ontario, so we prize and protect it.)
Maybe another day I’ll walk you on up the steps to the tomatoes and vegetable garden. But not today. It’s too hot.

*******************