The trouble with weeding in clay soil, during a drought, is the tight hold of the brick-like base of each weedy plant. The trouble with a rainy August is the opportunistic growth of those weeds, which will not be pulled during downpours.
The fun part of a surprising August rainy season comes from the visits at the feeders. We have baby birds and young squirrels hanging around, not really anxious to fly or run away. Mrs. Ichabod wanted more blue-berries on sale at Walmart and then realized how quickly longing can turn to loathing. I am fine with that since a few dollars in berries will make everyone happy outside.
The strangest thing was tracing the strange odor outside. No, it was not the garbage can fermenting in the heat and high humidity. The aroma reminded me of Waterloo, Ontario, where Seagrams brewed whiskey. Ah, that was it. The copious amounts of cracked corn were sitting on the soil and fermenting a bit from the rain. The birds are so careless at the feeder that the ground feeders cannot keep up. Eating for them often means scraping their beaks across the exit hole of the hanging feeder, scattering corn bits to the ground.
Some corn lands on the window sill, so I am trying to get some photos of birds and squirrels there. I learned that the mother squirrels send them out to find food on their own. In our yard, that means eating several meals a day at the feeders.
I looked through the rose garden to check for new exotic plants or some pollinator plants dug in for the beneficial insects. The dill is going to seed but where is the parsley? Then I remembered how many rabbits I saw in the rose garden.
Joe Pye is blooming, but I am waiting for Hidden Lily to stop hiding and start blooming. Right now they look more like the ugly cousins of the Cannas.
The roses are coming back from the Japanese beetles invasion. My approach is to promote milky spore disease in the soil and kill the surviving amorous adults next year. That means going out in the dark with a flashlight, finding beetles in the roses, and killing them. That will certainly cement my reputation on the block as being a bit different. But that is OK. Everyone calls me The Professor.
