Solstice greetings!

It’s summer solstice with a vengeance where I am: hot hot hot and cloudless at dawn. I was not on the water to greet the solstice sunrise this year. An unfortunate back injury has me off the water and forbidden to bend, lift or twist - all requirements to maneuver ungainly kayaks or canoes onto a vehicle - for a few weeks. If I’m coming across as grumpy, no paddling is why. And then all the other stupid stuff too.

Summer with its extreme heat and bugs makes me cruel. I kill mosquitoes, cockroaches and pill bugs who are rampaging through the gardens. The latter are not meant to eat living, growing things, only dead and decaying organic matter. This generation of superbug, however, play by different rules. They destroy germinating beans, swarm all over squash blossoms leaving nothing behind, and generally defy the conventional wisdom that they do not eat living plants. I’ve lost several plantings of okra and pumpkins to them this season. Ditto cowpeas. Diatomaceous earth (the white stuff in the pictures) and neem oil or garlic spray, so effective on soft bodied worms, do nothing to them.

I am now trying a trap and relocate solution using watermelon rind as bait overnight. My summer solstice dawn this year was a tad unromantic. Instead of celebrating ancient alignments somewhere powerful, I was occupied with catching hundreds of roll poly bugs, moving them to the compost bins. Yes, the same bins which bees recently were persuaded to vacate, somewhat reluctantly, I must add. There are still a bunch of dazed and confused bees kinda hanging out in the vicinity, as I discovered when I thought to tend to the compost.

Tulbaghia is flowering, though, for this glorious sunshiny solstice, and seems immune to pesky pill bugs.

The front cereal rye was harvested a few days ago, a week or so later than I wanted. That awful kitchen remodel chaos ran interference on my garden calendar. On all my life plans, in fact.

In the early pre sunrise dawn on day of harvest I found that the rye patch had been bugged, in a manner of speaking. The rye stalks were being used as overnight bivouac for a gathering of rather beautiful wild bees with the longest and most elegant feelers I’ve ever seen on a bee.

Not sure who exactly they are in terms of identification (sweat bees, maybe?), but my movements or the sun rising woke them. They had slipped silently away into the day by the time my harvesting activity reached their overnight camp.

In other harvest news, the golden globes of ‘Orange Hat’ dwarf cherry tomatoes are coming in. I’m not wild about them - they are rather acidic, with very tough skins. It was a free packet of seeds. I probably would not buy this tomato variety again. As an ornamental they are very pretty, with loads of brilliant little fruit, but as an edible - meh. Passable cooked with garlic and chile but give me heartburn raw - and I’m not usually prone to heartburn.

I’ve withdrawn from the farmers market as of the end of June, so there’s one more market day left. I want to concentrate on gallery exhibition pieces and juried art and craft markets. And wandering.

Even though my offerings are always well received, the physical toll of weekly Saturday markets with all the heavy lifting, loading, unloading, carrying in relentlessly extreme heat which has become normal, is having a negative impact on my ageing body. I choose to say “no more” and quit before it cripples me. I have other things to do with my one wild and precious life.

To this end I added a new page to my website, listing the art markets and shows where I will be exhibiting. It took way longer than it should have to create that “Find us” page. It is not the thing of beauty I intended, thanks to AI constantly running interference, like a very irritating, very yappy, little ankle nipping puppy.

I did not ask for AI assistance. My website host provided it, suddenly and unasked, though I might have see it coming. The formula for this iteration of evil greedy capitalists is that of any drug peddler: provide a few freebies, (force feed if necessary) get the client hooked, then make them pay. Or in the case of my website host, bombard and hope I will surrender and submit.

Not going to happen. I’m old. I value my autonomy while I still have it.

Next downtime, my challenge is to work out how to disable this immensely irritating computer software generated interference on my every keyboard stroke, on my own website for which I pay a lotta money. God damn the pusher man…. AI is not making my life easier or more efficient at the moment.

What is likely a computer generated graphic, photographed in Grants, New Mexico.

But I digress.

Happy Solstice from the sweltering desert.

May all your squash be blossoming beauties.