The summer apple harvest is more than half complete
mild highs only in the 70s is twice as great as it was at the end of July. As this cool front moves away, the period between August 25 and August 27 usually brings a return of warmer temperatures in the 80s or 90s.
Notes on the Progress of the Year
As Late Summer ages, catalpas start to pale. Buckeye leaves turn brown under the high canopy. Black walnut leaves trickle to the ground, foretaste of the great leafdrop to come. Patches of scarlet appear in the sumac and poison ivy.
Crickets, cicadas and katydids become more insistent. Whip-poor-wills, cedar waxwings and catbirds migrate. Bees are everywhere in the fields now. Rows of lanky great mulleins, black and gone to seed, line the bike paths. Elderberries are dark and sweet for wine. Pokeweed plants are the size of small trees, with purple stalks and berries. The panicled dogwood shows its pale fruit, its leaves fading pink. Trefoils decay, and staghorns darken brown above their red or yellow leaves.
But goldenrod brightens the fields, and the height of tall bellflower season softens the mood of the decaying forest undergrowth with blossoms of powder blue. Beneath them, big, white puffball mushrooms emerge like moons among spring's rotting stems and leaves.
In the Field and Garden
Plum and pear harvests are underway. Elderberry picking is about over. The summer apple harvest is more than half complete.
The Ohio Valley should still have four weeks without light frost, and could have up to eight weeks to ten weeks without a tomato-killing freeze.
Scout your fields for late-season pests, for rootworm damage, secondbrood corn borer, secondgeneration of bean leaf beetles, and rootworm beetles.
The potato harvest is usually a fourth complete. Wild grapes are ready to pick. A few fields are being prepared for winter wheat seeding. Prickly mallow and jimsonweed are taking over an occasional soybean field.
About a tenth of soybean foliage in the lower Midwest has turned by now; the stage of their leaves measures the maturity of the corn.
Puffball mushroom hunting season begins if the nightsare cool and damp.
Journal
The intensity of early morning robin song decreases slowly through mid and late summer. By August 15th, Yellow Springs robins have stopped giving their predawn calls; they have changed their tune to short chirps and low clucking sounds. This is migration language, and by the end of the first week of September, the robins have begun to gather in flocks throughout the village, the Glen, and along the bike path in preparation for their journey south.
Between the end of the their melodic spring and summer warbling and the beginning of their autumn flocking signals, robins occasionally sing their most poignant and beautiful songs of all.
I first heard one of these interim performances on August 30, 1989. That day, I noted in my journal how the cardinals had roused me out of bed before sunrise. Then the crows came through a little while later. And then as I got up, a robin gave a long, dramatic call that lasted maybe half a minute. Then silence: no robins or cardinals or even crows for hours.
I have notes about another such call from August 12 of 1990. And this year, August 3, I was sitting in the back yard at nine o'clock in the morning, and from the trees a robin started singing loud and strong. Unlike the gentle, monotonous mating and nesting melodies, this was more earnest and more eloquent. And it lasted for minutes, a prolonged, melodic cry, a wild lament for the end of summer.
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