Summer's Song

This summer has been marked by tempo.  We started in cool jazz with warm, sunny mornings gathering gallons of raspberries.  The blueberries overlapped, and we dove right into cherry picking.  Then the bushels of St John's wort... 
The back beat to these lovely pursuits was the ever-present Disco boom-boom-boom of filling the shelves with soaps and balms and teas and herb blends, in preparation for shows beyond our regular scope.  We barely lifted our eyes from our work.

 And then, just like that, it was August.  The 70's rock revival of summer.
This is the beauty of perennial herbs and food plants.  They just don't care!
The one plot, where I usually plant vegetables is fenced in.  It is now full of foxtails, chicory, and ragweed, taller than me.  A couple of the borders, where the perennials grow, are basically out of control.

 

Next year, we'll start early and dig up the wild berry vines, mulberry seedlings, small sumac trees, and pokeweed that the birds have planted and our neglect has nurtured.  It will be work, but we'll get it back.
There were a few annuals that we took care of, but other than an occasional mowing and pulling back the weeds to gather specific herbs, we've been lazy gardeners.

And still... it keeps going.  The beat goes on.
We've been picking the ripe elderberries each evening, and freeze about a quart every day.

They'll continue to ripen for another couple of weeks.  The stems deepen, the berries turn to dark, almost black garnet orbs, and with each day our fingers remember better exactly the pressure required to roll them from their stems.



The persimmons are hanging heavily on the branches.

It is with regret that I must report that the groundhog living under the deck keeps trying to develop an affinity for the unripe fruit (freak!) and climbs the tree to grab them.  Of course they are inedible at this point, so s/he leaves them on the ground with a single bite gone.