The Perseid meteor shower’s biggest show begins Wednesday

AUGUST 7 - 13, 2020

But the flowers were now at their peak of blossom Joe-Pye weed, last buttonball blooms, loosestrife, white boneset, many varieties of sunflowers, bouncing Bet – around which the sphinx moths foraged, wild balsam apples, milkweed, butterfly weed, bindweed, wild wisteria, self-heal, wood sage, hooded skullcap, wild bergamot, monkey flowers, Beaumont’s root, basilweed, and others.

August Derleth, “A Countryman’s Journal,” Aug. 7 in the 1940s.

THE SEVENTH WEEK OF DEEP SUMMER Astronomical Data and Lore

The Tomato and

Sweet Corn Moon wanes throughout the week, reaches apogee (its position farthest from Earth) at 11:55 p.m. on August 9 and enters its fourth quarter on August 11 at 11:45 a.m. Rising before midnight and setting in the late morning, this moon passes overhead in the early morning darkness, encouraging creatures to feed more heavily at that time, especially as the cool wave of August 10 approaches.

On August 13, Venus appears larger than at any time this year. Mars travels in Pisces, rising in the middle of the night, moving overhead by the time Venus comes up with Gemini.

The Perseid Meteor Shower occurs between July 17 and August 24, peaking on August 12 – 13 with up to 60 meteors in an hour.

Weather Trends

The August 10 cool front frequently causes violent weather throughout the Plains and the South. This second August front also contributes to the erosion of chances for highs in the 90s. The likelihood of rain increases sharply for two to three days because of this weather system, and within the next seven days along the 40th Parallel, lows reach into the 40s fifteen times more often than they do during the last week of July.

Notes on the Progress of the Year

Well into Late Summer, ragweed pollen fills the humid afternoons, wood nettle goes to seed in the bottomlands, honeysuckle berries and wild cherries ripen, and hickory nuts and black walnuts drop into the undergrowth.

Blackberries are ready to eat when ragweed blossoms. And the season’s second-last wave of wildflowers: the Joe Pye weed, monkey flower, tall coneflower, clearweed, horse weed, white snakeroot, jumpseed, prickly mallow, virgin’s bower, white boneset, field thistle and Japanese knotweed come into bloom in the open fields and along fence rows.

Golden and purple coneflowers and red, pink and violet phlox still rule the gardens. Orangeand-gold-flowered trumpet vines still curl through trellises. Ephemeral resurrection lilies replace the day lilies, the Asiatic lilies and the Oriental lilies. Mums and stonecrop color the dooryards.

In the shade of the woods, leafcup is the dominant flower, almost the only one in bloom. Along the lake shores, arrowhead blossoms as rusty dodder spreads across the tattered black raspberry bushes. Milkweed flowers turn to pods.

In the mornings, cardinals and doves still sing briefly half an hour before dawn. Robins sometimes give long singsong performances throughout the day. Cricket song increases in the evenings. Blue jays still care for their young, whining and flitting through the bushes. But starlings and warblers become more restless. The number of fireflies dwindles. Hummingbirds, meadow larks, Baltimore orioles, plovers and purple martins start to disappear south; their departure marks a quickening in the sun’s drop toward equinox.

In the Field and Garden

August and September are soil-testing months - both for your fall and winter garden as well as for the fields in which you intend to sow winter wheat and rye, alfalfa, clover and timothy.

Plant or renew pasture in September or October

for April and May. The waning moon is just right for the third cut of alfalfa hay.

August is the beginning of lawn seeding and sodding time, and time for band seeding alfalfa on many farms. Smooth brome grass, orchard grass and timothy are typically planted now.

Average temperatures drop one to two degrees a week in August, two to three degrees a week in September. When honeysuckle berries ripen black walnuts drop into the undergrowth, then dig your potatoes.

Go hickory nut hunting and check to see if hemlock loopers are out eating up all your hemlocks. Then gather great mullein leaves for herbal potions.

Journal

I have grown older with a house and garden in the same place for 40 years. I have outlasted shrubbery, trees, perennial plantings and neighbors.

I have watched the repairs I made on the house gradually deteriorate and need more repairs.

I have observed stability in certain flower beds, like the lilies, holding steady or spreading just a little. But other things, like the weeds, the bamboo, the honeysuckles, the trumpet creeper vine and the Virginia creeper are taking over.

I look ahead sometimes over a glass of wine watching the sunset and the birds feeding back and forth at the feeders, and I wonder what will happen here in the years ahead.

Like the “Where do you see yourself in ten years?” interview question, I wonder, if I am alive, if I will still be here, and if new invasive species will surprise me and overrun even more of the yard. I wonder whether the leak in the shed roof will get fixed or not, what things will go wrong with furnace or with my arthritis.

The longer I ride the circuit, the more I become like objects that have aged, and even with the lessons of the house and garden, I keep being surprised. I am not separate from those objects and events like I thought I was.

Who knew!

For an autographed copy of Bill Felker’s latest collection of essays,“Deep Time Is in the Garden,” send $17.00 to him at P.O. Box 431, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387.