June to August 2013...The Summer that almost wasn't

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Summer of 2013 seemed to drag it’s feet. It took a very long time to warm up to seasonal …and then it remained on the cool side for the rest of it. We had fewer than 14 days of what might be called hot summer weather. It sounds strange to say that we had only about 8 days of sticky humidity. I couldn’t bring myself to complain. Temps remained moderate and plants which required the heat to ripen fruit…like tomatoes and apple trees…seemed to drudge along into late August before yielding fruit ripe on the vine. Heat loving flowers like the Dahlias didn’t bud up until AFTER the first frost in the first week of September! In short, it was such a snore of a growing season that I’m only getting around to recording my questionable progress in the last week of the year!

In late May we had a miniflood, when one of our neighbours opened a beaver dam and all the mess rushed downhill taking out some of my water irises and almost taking out the culvert under our driveway. In the end it wasn’t a great tragedy as it brought some soil nutrients from up the hill and flattened the grassy area where I wanted to put the duck pond… so… since the soil was soaked and mucky it was not possible to hire heavy digging equipment…and that meant that it had to be dug by spade.

The hollyhocks which were planted last season came into their own in July…wonderful! I wanted some yellow hollyhocks for sentimental reasons and a GoY friend and my sister came to the rescue. I planted so many hollyhocks this summer that they survived the deer predation and I may have an even greater showing next season! The hollyhocks were the success story of summer of 2013.

Have included a pic of the autumn flowers (asters and golden rod) because the purple and gold is a delight.

Near the end of the summer, while digging the pond, I decided to scale back the decking at the back door and move it to the south end of the house to incorporate it into a sunroom/porch.

This will be the subject of the next blog, I suppose. Everything seemed to grow well in the summer of 2013 but seemed late because we never really had a prolonged hot period. It just was NOT normal. But it definitely had it’s delights.

• 30 Dec, 2013
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