Sunday’s lunar apogee makes for a good morning to fish
I see a fearless generosity in the flowers and trees, in the way birds sing out at dawn, in the steady drumming of the rain. As I grew older and found I had things to protect, I forgot. I completely forgot that I had always had enough in the first place. Now I am trying to learn this once again— total abundance, nothing begrudged.
— Sallie Tisdale THE THIRD WEEK OF DEEP SUMMER
Astronomical data and lore
On July 12, the Wheat and Alfalfa Cutting Moon enters its fourth quarter at 1:27 a.m. and reaches apogee (its position farthest from Earth) at 6:30 p.m. Lunar fourth quarter at apogee is the moon’s weakest position in respect to tides and influence on behavior. Still, when it passes overhead in the morning this week, it should encourage fish to bite, at least a little. The approach of a cool front around July 14 should drop the barometer and making angling more productive.
The shooting stars
The Delta Aquarid meteor shower extends from July 12 – August 23, peaking at about 20 shooting stars per hour on July 28 – 29,
Weather trends
By this time in July, the Corn Tassel Rains have just about ended, and chances for significant precipitation drop quickly. Temperatures have been in the 80s and 90s throughout most of the country, but the period between July 13 and 15 can bring cooler highs in the 70s and sometimes even in the 60s.
Notes on the progress of the year
Giant green June beetles have appeared in the garden. Elderberry flowers turn to fruit, like the blossoms of pokeweed, poison ivy, and the trilliums. August’s goldenrod can be four feet tall now. Lupine pods break apart to spread their seeds. White snakeroot, ironweed, boneset, wingstem, tall coneflowers and gray-headed coneflowers are budding. Timothy is bearded with seeds, and rose of Sharon comes into bloom. Almost all the lilies are flowering, but the bright yellow primroses and spring daisies are gone, and the shade-loving cohosh has its berries.
The first buckeye, apple, peach and cherry leaves become yellow and drift to the ground, marking the shift into Deep Summer. Water striders hatch in the ponds just as alewives head back to the Atlantic from their estuaries. The behavior of raccoons, opossums and groundhogs often becomes erratic in the Dog Day heat. Young robins, blackbirds and blue jays haunt the honeysuckle bushes eating red and orange berries. The young of the great blue heron leave their rookeries. Canadian geese walk single file through their habitat, their goslings grown and following them. Autumn’s bird migrations begin as the rough-winged swallow flies south.
Lanky ichneumons get into the house and perch on walls like gargantuan mosquitoes. Cicadas call when the days are hot. Blueweed flowers are at the top of their spikes. Lamb’s ear season closes as the first giant burdock blooms along the
roadsides. Blackberries are August size this week, but still green in the North. Milkweed pods emerge; they will burst at the approach of middle fall, just 80 days from now.
Long, fresh, red, seedpods hang from locust branches. Thistledown and tufts of meadow goatsbeard float across the fields. Among the many wildflowers, find golden showy coneflowers, pale blue campanula, purple coneflowers, monarda, germander, skullcap, fogfruit, great Indian plantain, fringed loosestrife, bouncing Bets, daisy fleabane, moth mullein, leafcup, lopseed, hobblebush, wood mint, tall bell flower, great mullein, small-flowered agrimony, tick trefoil, velvet leaf, trumpet creeper and jimson weed in bloom.
In the field and garden
Squash beetles bore into the squash and pumpkin and cucumber vines.
Potato leafhoppers reach economic levels in alfalfa. Field corn is silking, and detasseling operations have begun in seed cornfields.
Mimosa webworms appear on locust trees. Bagworms attack arborvitae, euonymus, juniper, linden, maple, and fir. Root diseases stalk the soybeans. The wheat still standing in the fields sometimes suffers from rust, powdery mildew, head scab and glume blotch.
Farmers feel the pressure from Canadian thistle, ragweed, foxtail, lamb’s quarter, dogbane, velvetleaf, nut grass and Johnson grass. San Jose scale and flathead borers are active on flowering fruit trees.
In the Lower Midwest and East, farmers have usually cut almost half of the second crop of alfalfa – along with almost half the wheat.
The peak period of heat stress begins for summer crops. High temperatures may start to turn some grasses dormant.
Journal
Followed by Sirius, the Dog Star, the constellation Orion accompanies the Dog Days of Deep Summer as it moves invisibly into the center of the southern sky at noon. A simple star chart reveals all this, but the land itself gives plain cues about the heavens.
When one thing is happening, says the first law of phenology, something else is happening, too. Finches in the thistledown, cicadas calling through the day, katydids at night, all pull the Dog Days in. This is simple earth astronomy, in which the plants and insects read the stars, even when the midday sun is so hot and bright it keeps those stars from view.
Earth astronomy is like a formula of space and events, where “X” could be the sky and “Y” could be elderberry fruit and blueberries and summer peaches, and the solution or the conclusion lies in seeing them reflecting one another, tied like theorems in a true geometry of creation, constellations of close and distant objects, stars that may have died a million years ago, still shining to us in their lanky formations, placed into shapes by our minds, tied to other shapes here on earth, all around us.
Canis Major and Orion, the signature star groups of the noontime Dog Days, end up hiding in the tangle of velvet leaf and water hemlock, burdock, stonecrop, Joe Pye weed, plants that move in time across the wheel of earth just like Sirius and its cohorts drift above the southern horizon.
Bill Felker’s latest book, Deep Time Is in the Garden: New Almanac Essays of Time and Place and Spirit, is available on Amazon. Or, for your autographed copy, send $17.00 to Bill Felker, P.O. Box 431, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387