Happy Lughnasadh!

Happy traditional Lughnasadh/Lammas! I actually celebrate at the true cross-quarter point (when the Sun is at 15°00′ of Leo), which this year falls on August 7 at 10:57 a.m. EDT. But August 1 is “Loaf-mass” or Lammas, the festival of First Fruits of harvest and also of the god Lugh and therefore a time to honor all forms of skill and craftsmanship.

I keep doing this–I determine that I’ll post more often and then don’t get to it! It seems like July was endless, and now summer must surely be over…it can’t only be Lammas, it must be Labor Day, isn’t it? (Look at all the Back To School ad flyers!) The days are already obviously shorter. The sky isn’t light when I go to bed now and local sunset will occur before 8:00 p.m. in a few more days. It’s gotten cooler and dryer–last night, it went down to 53°, although the heat and humidity will be back by mid-week.

We’ve come to the point where I can tell that it’s been a great summer: that I’ve been spending time outside, working hard, taking advantage of the summer weather and getting good stuff done in my yard and garden. I can tell because everything hurts or itches. 🙁 I wake up and hobble into the kitchen like I had terminal arthritis, although most of the kinks dissolve in the shower. The itchies are less cooperative–the flip side of hot weather skimpy clothes, I’m afraid–and not wearing a shirt to pick blackberries!

Last Monday and Tuesday afternoons, I spent a total of 8 solid hours in the vegetable garden, mostly on my hands and knees weeding every square inch. I’d let it get much too overgrown, and between that and the heat and drought, most of it isn’t doing all that well. The garden now looks very tidy, but it also usually looks parched, and I can only water on even-numbered days. Pepperell has instituted water use restrictions with fines. After all those floods in March, the Nashua River is barely trickling over the dam, and there are more rocks than water visible downstream from the bridge.

The weeding itself took most of the time, and I also, finally, thinned the carrots, which are starting to make carrots, yay! I tied up the tomatoes, which are loaded with green tomatoes, a couple of them just starting to get a yellow glow on top to indicate that they’re thinking about ripening. I’ve been picking cherry tomatoes for about a week, but only one or two at a time. They rarely make it into the house. 🙂 All the plants are indeterminate, but the cherry tomato is aiming for the stars and I’ll have to put in stakes over the tomato cage. I’d mowed the lawns the previous Thursday, and raked up piles of fluffy dry grass from the thickest sections to mulch the pumpkins and zucchini. The pumpkins are very happy with this and immediately started putting out tons of new leaves and blossoms, but it may be too little, too late; I don’t know if I’ll get a pumpkin. I am getting some zucchini, but ditto there; all the zucchini so far have shriveled blossom ends. I picked one today to see if the “good” part is edible. I don’t think I’m going to be buried in zucchini. The garlic is a total loss but I might replant that. The onions and potatoes…we’ll see. The Brussels sprouts, nada, next year I will start them very early in pots.

The basil is doing better than I’ve ever had basil do, but I haven’t picked any so far and probably should have. The pepper plants are big and fluffy but don’t have any peppers. The biggest successes are the tomatoes and flowers–I sure can grow marigolds! They’re thriving! The bachelor’s buttons (or cornflowers) have been blooming for a while, and the purple and blue gladiola I planted have just started flowering. The bee balm in the back yard is about five feet tall.

But I’ve learned some lessons for next year, and now I have a tiller. 🙂 First things: till the soil deeper and mulch much earlier.

All that was a lot of work, like catching up on neglect always is. I’ve also been pushing myself hard with the Bowflex, and taking those long walks. By Tuesday night, I had to pop one of the only two over-the-counter meds in my bathroom cabinet, acetaminophen. The other is Benadryl, for itchies and very rare sleep aid, and I might end up taking those because I simply can’t manage to avoid the poison ivy no matter how careful I am! Every year I swear I’m going to spray it and never get to it in time. Between the mosquito bites and little spots of poison ivy here and there (mostly where I got scratched by blackberry brambles), I have very annoying itchies. Plus blackberry bramble scratches, of course.

I’m picking pints of blackberries and freezing them. I promised my sister blackberry pie, and I use them for my fruit-oatmeal cookies and other things in the winter. I’ve found something amusing: that old party game Twister is terrific practice for picking blackberries (especially for picking blackberries without a shirt when you know there’s poison ivy in there someplace). I’ve contorted into the most amazing stretches to reach just one last berry…and not get snagged. It’s like Twister combined with that old Operation game. 🙂

Otherwise, it’s been publishing work, watching book sales climb, going to Dad’s band concert which was great this week with a huge audience. Two tight deadlines proved very fruitful creatively. I made a half-page ad for Readercon 22, because we did an exchange with 5Pi-Con and they needed our ad this week. And, I decided to write a short fiction for the Bay State Equine Rescue Blogathon run by novelfriend. I’ve been wanting to write and market some short fiction and, as usually happens with such a vague objective, ideas were just circulating without gelling. But the Blogathon post gave me a deadline, a theme and a length limit, all of which got my Muse into peak form. The story, “Last Word,” came out well, and taught me what I need to aim for with short fiction, generally–it’s not my preferred oeuvre. (I wasn’t trying to make people cry, though–honest!)