I like to get up early and pick the beans. With all the planting done, it’s time to watch things grow. The only thing left to plant are turnips and when I dig a row of potatoes, I will replace them with turnip seeds. The zucchini grow like baby geese, doubling in size within a day. Gotta keep them picked. When the plants are healthy, they are like jungle vegetation -- thick and green and tubular. If my wife touches the little spines, the tiny needles on the edges of the zucchini leaves and stems, she breaks out in a rash. (Good to know!)

With some important help, the garlic harvest for 2020 is in the barn and curing. It was a good season. The difficulty is the Hudson Valley Garlic Festival, one of the oldest garlic festivals in the country, has been canceled for 2020. This is the fourth festival canceled so far this year. Times are tough. Worst comes to worst, I will have more stock to plant this fall. I will be plowing a new field on the hill this week and that is exciting. Gotta get the soil ready for the cloves to be planted in November: break up the sod, pick out stones, disk, and plant mustard, disk again, rototill, and put down aged-manure, till, plant, mulch. That’s the plan. The seed garlic has been separated from the pack and is hanging in the new woodshed. No wood in the woodshed yet, but we’re not very strict around these parts. (Photo attached.) Simply put, the seed garlic is the garlic too big and beautiful to be sold to the public-at-large. “Plant the best, eat the rest.” Old Carpathian Mountain garlic grower’s adage.

For the first time, my field by the state highway is fully fenced and gated and I have suffered no white-tailed deer damage. During the days of no fence, if I planted fifty tomato plants, twenty would be nipped off the next day. I love my fence! Then, the muskrats living in my irrigation pond, loved to come under the fence and eat the tops of my white onions. So those holes were plugged. All my tomatoes are staked-up this year, too, and that should increase yields exponentially. Tomatoes soon.

Danny came over this morning and I had a little time and we had coffee on the social distancing patio, under the heavy leaf-cover of summer, and it gave me a moment to watch the action on my sparkling pond. July is the time six-inch bass love to jump from the fresh water, catching bugs in mid-air, and splash back in like breaching whales. (Well, OK, not quite.) And there, through the shade of the trees, I could see the dragonflies hunting and hovering and like biplanes and damsel flies, all shinning in the sunlight over the reflecting green water. I jumped in yesterday. Cold! Deep. Summer!

There are a number of Baltimore Orioles in the yard this year, but I have not seen the Scarlet Tanager nor Indigo Bunting, but, then again, I haven’t been looking much -- time at premium. Unofficially, the birdlife seems “light” this year and I hope the downward spiral of insect and birdlife will stabilize, if not rebound, soon. I hope, but I have no faith. We humans continue to pollute ourselves into a corner like a mad house painter. There’s no stopping us. We’re too happy, too content with the status quo. IMHO.

When I can no longer hear the evening song of the wood thrush, take me beyond Comet Hale-Bopp so I can witness if there is a spaceship there, and I’m telling ya right now, there isn’t. There’s only one spaceship and we are on it. There’s no apparent captain.