The Sound of Monarch Wings Flapping

The milkweed has been blooming for a few weeks now and it is utterly delightful to see all the monarch butterflies flitting around the garden. I think of butterflies as slow and gentle beings, failing to remember that monarchs migrate thousands of miles every year. The speed at which they move through the garden is astonishing. The other day I was standing in the middle of the garden watching them, enraptured. One of them flew so close past my head I heard their wings flapping! I had never imagined that butterfly wings make noise, but they do. The sound was akin to the fast beat of a bat’s wings, only softer and quieter. What a gift that butterfly gave me!

Multigrain sourdough sandwich bread–I’m still baking!

Since I am not growing zucchini in the garden, a friend of mine who is and had too many, asked if I would like some. Couldn’t say no! And in fine zucchini tradition, she left them in a bag on my porch and then texted me afterwards. Not a completely anonymous zucchini porch delivery, but well performed in the spirit of sneaking excess zucchini onto neighbor’s porches.

James promptly wizarded up a zucchini lasagna in which zucchini slices played the role of lasagna noodles. Creative and delicious! We still have enough to make zucchini bread and a small batch of sweet zucchini relish.

In the middle of the week we had a huge, slow storm move through with some gusty winds and a long period of rain. It was cool and pleasant and kept us very cool for a couple of days, a welcome break from summer heat. The storm also caused a bit of a pole bean failure. Not the beans themselves, they are doing so well they actually helped contribute to the fail. Between the beans growing so tall and being so heavy, the wet ground and the gusty wind, the 8-foot tall end pole of the trellis tipped right over!

We couldn’t get the pole buried back in the ground so it would remain upright and had to add a couple smaller poles around it and tie them together to brace it up. We’ve since had more rain and some wind, and the pole still stands. It wavers around a bit, but hopefully will make it to the end of the season without any additional support.

My beans might be magical

The pole failure reminded me that the skunk beans did the same thing to their trellis last summer. But I blamed it on the fact that I had three different kinds of pole beans climbing up a series of poorly planned out trellising. This year it’s just the skunk beans on this trellis. Clearly next summer I will need to upgrade their trellis structure further. And I know exactly how.

We’re going to get some mesh panels and make super cool arches I won’t be able to make a tunnel like in the DIY article because my garden beds are laid out east-west, but I will be able to plant beneath them vegetables and greens that don’t mind a bit of protection from a hot summer sun. Growing butternut squash up a wooden ladder has worked out marvelously, so having sturdy arches for beans and pumpkins too will be useful and pretty!

On a completely unrelated to gardens note, if you are incredibly annoyed that search engines give you AI results, you can filter them out! All you need to do is put -ai (that’s minus or dash ai) after your search terms and you will get AI-free results. Or at least, you won’t get the AI generated summary crap at the top of the page. It also appears to cut down a bit on advertising. AI has infiltrated everything these days whether we want it to or not, so to be able to filter some of it out with this simple little trick is a relief. Plus, by not allowing AI in your search results, you are also saving planetary resources, namely water.

Oh, speaking of saving resources. We’ve had our heat pump since early May and it has been performing beautifully in the summer heat. Plus it is saving electricity. For the month of July so far we’ve used 282 kilowatt hours of electricity compared to 479 KWH for the same time period a year ago. That’s a 41% savings! Some of it has to do with the air conditioner being over 20-years-old, so we’ve gained in efficiency. And, since the heat pump cools by drawing humidity from the air, we no longer need to run a separate dehumidfier. So many wins on this one!

Reading

• Book: The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere by Nicholas Triolo. A thoughtful book about circumambulation, walking in circles around, usually a mountain, but other places as well. It’s about beginnings and endings, healing, and the refusal to conquer and dominate.
• Poem: This Evening Let’s by Adrienne Rich
• Essay: Book Bans Don’t Work by Michael Dirda (gift link) A really wonderful essay about how book bans don’t work. A kid who wants to read a book is going to manage to read it whether or not you want them to. Just ask 14-year-old me about pilfering my mom’s copy of Judy Blume’s Wifey from where she’d hidden it so I couldn’t read it. I asked if I could read it, she said no, it disappeared, I found it, read it, then put it back, and she never knew.

Quote

“I had internalized a larger cultural fixation for results, starving a slower and more reverential approach to time and place. Encircling moves in slower motion, and seems to better match foot and breath and intention. Mountains might be lesser served when atomized as single-serving objectives, for to perceive summits or planets or people as useful only when tackled and controlled is to lose sight of a far larger opportunity to belong in an ecology of uncertainty. There is merit in leaving things alone. There is merit in surrender. There is merit in mystery.”

~Nicholas Triolo, The Way Around, page 89

Listening

• Podcast: Planet Critical: Why Earth Needs a Feminist Movement: Silvia Federici. Federici is one of the best, most interesting Feminist critics working these days and she has lots of things to say about the control of women’s bodies and the how and why women’s rights are being eroded.
• Podcast: Between the Covers: Robert Macfarlane: Is a River Alive? This book is currently on the top of my TBR pile and after listening to the interview, I am looking forward to reading it even more than I was before.

#AI #heatPump #milkweed #monarchButterfly #poleBeans #trellis #zucchini