Summer apples are half-picked, and tobacco is topped
The scents of a late summer night are sweet and evocative. I sink into them as into a cool, northern lake. To tread on bergamot or gill-over-theground in the darkness is to be instantly enveloped in spicy sweetness…. The off fungal smell of mushroom shouldering up through the soil prickles in our nostrils, unmistakable and indescribable. We sniff like bears.
— Cathy Johnson
The moon and stars
The Restless Billy Goat Moon, waxes throughout the week, entering its second quarter at 10:20 a.m. on August 15 and reaching perigee, its position closest to Earth on August 17 at 4:00 a.m. Rising in the afternoon and setting after midnight, this moon passes overhead in the night, encouraging creatures to be more active then, especially as the August 17 and 24 cool fronts approach.
August is the month of the Milky Way in the eastern night sky. Cygnus can be found there, its formation a giant cross. Below Cygnus is Aquila, spreading like a great eagle. Almost directly above you, Vega of the constellation Lyra is the brightest star in the heavens. Hercules stands beside it. Early summer’s Corona Borealis and Arcturus have moved to the west.
Weather trends
This is the week that summer’s retreat is measurable in the likelihood of early-morning lows in the 40s (a 10 percent chance now exists for such cold through the rest of the month). And last week, chances of 90s were steady about 40 percent. Suddenly, those chances are reduced by half, and August 17 is the last day of the year on which a high of 100 degrees is still reasonable to expect. This shift to autumn often goes unnoticed, since highs in the 80s and 90s continue to dominate the afternoons. Brisk highs in the 60s, however, now occur 5 percent of the afternoons on record.
August 17 is a pivotal date for the first frosts in the West and North. Snow is often reported in Canada near this date, and the countdown to frost time begins for the Midwest. The 19th of the month, however, has the highest frequency of 90s (35 percent chance) of any other day in the week. Chances of rain increase from 25 percent at the beginning of the period to 30 percent by August 21. And full moon on the 22nd should encourage storms, cooler weather and the formation of a hurricane in the Caribbean.
Zeitgebers (Events in nature that tell the time of year)
Violet Joe Pye weed becomes gray like the thistledown. Fruit of the bittersweet ripens. Spicebush berries redden. Rose pinks and great blue lobelias hide in the waysides.
This is the time that spiders in the woods weave their final webs. The katydids now chant through the night. Cicadas fill the afternoons.
Grackle activity increases while cardinal song becomes less fequent. The early morning robins are silent. Whip-poor-wills, cedar waxwings, and catbirds follow the signs toward the Gulf of Mexico.
Morning fogs are thickening as the night air cools more often into the 50s.
The end of fireflies, the occasional long and loud robin valediction song, the yellow jackets in the windfall apples and plums, the appearance of white snakeroot and boneset flowers, the fading of cottonwood foliage, and the occasional falling leaf combine now with all the other endings and beginnings to accelerate the passage of the summer, building momentum with an accumulation of more and more events.
Mind and body
The S.A.D. Index, which measures seasonal stress on a scale from 1 to 100, reveals challenges both from Dog Day heat and lunar perigee this week, flirting with the 40s most days. Continue to be good to yourself, pace your work and family load, eat right and get moderate exercise in the morning or evening – or in an air-conditioned gym.
In the field and garden
The day’s length, which shortened at the rate of only six minutes a week one month ago, now contracts more than a quarter of an hour in a week, providing more breeding stimulus to ewes and does.
Watermelons are ripe; summer apples are halfpicked, and tobacco is topped on about two-thirds of Ohio Valley plots.
Almost all the soybeans have flowered. Farmers are bringing in corn for silage, digging potatoes, picking tomatoes and finishing the second or third cut of alfalfa hay. Soybean foliage is turning; and the flowers have set their pods.
Seed the lawn, and band seed alfalfa. Smooth brome grass, orchard grass and timothy are also good crops for August planting.
The first ears of field corn are mature by today and at least a third of the crop is in dent. Some green acorns are falling into the buckets of acorn roasters and tempting deer to gather near groves of oaks.
“No marigolds yet closed are,” wrote the 17th century poet Robert Herrick. “No shadows great appear, nor doth the early shepherd’s star, Shine like a spangle here.
The shepherd’s star, Capella, an outrider of autumn’s Taurus and winter’s Orion is still inconspicuous in the eastern sky these nights, and noon shadows still hold close to their solstice length. Once the mid-season hosta and the lilies are gone, summer seems to stabilize again, solid in the rose of Sharon, the gold rudbeckia and the purple coneflowers, the tall wingstem and ironweed, the rich opening of ragweed, the green budding stalks of the field goldenrod poised, their season ahead, reassuring, promising long-lived asters and mums in another couple of weeks.
Hummingbird moths still come to the impatiens. Touch-me-nots are still full bloom, tall bell flowers strong and blue, burdock holds beside the oxeye, bouncing bets, and new six-petaled wild cucumbers, the yellow and the blue flowered wild lettuce, bull thistle, virgin’s bower, tall nettle, prickly mallow, small woodland sunflower, soft velvet leaf, sundrops, and heal all.
Along the rivers, bur marigolds are budding, zig-zag goldenrod, and broad-leafed swamp goldenrod. Water horehound, willow herb, and swamp milkweed are still open, still a little wood mint. Late Summer’s jumpseeds aren’t quite ready to jump. Damselflies still hunt by the water. Cabbage butterflies still mate.
Bill Felker’s “Daybook for September” (with extensive journal entries for every day of the month) is now available. For your autographed copy, send $20 to Poor Will, P.O. Box 431, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387, or order from Amazon or from www.poorwillsalmanack. com.