Late July

2022. What on earth is going on? Nothing is doing what it should be doing. The heat is frightening and even I, as an inveterately stingy waterer, have been forced to roll out a hose. I have plans and visions of resilient, drought tolerant, perennial-rich, abundant planting but plans rarely survive contact with the enemy, and it is a year too soon. Next year, the plants will be bigger, the roots deeper, the gaps in between (where the soil is exposed to the harsh sun) smaller and I hope we will be ready for everything the changing climate can throw at us.

Until then, I water the roots of the anemones and the grasses, and I hope for the best.

The rare exceptions are bronze fennel and the echinops. They don’t seem to care at all about the weather and I have had a forest of bronze fennel which towers over everything else. Echinops hovers over the box beds (where it is meant to be) and in the squash patch (where it isn’t). The upside is that, combined with a few grasses and the odd sun-bleached poppy seed head, it makes an astonishingly long-lived arrangement of flowers for the kitchen table. Oh, and the bees are swarming all over them.

My diary from this week last year documents the heat then too. But I remark on how it lasted for days before it rained again. This year, I can scroll all the way to the end of the weather forecast with no end in sight. We have had one single rain storm in July and it did not feel nearly enough. I water the tomatoes twice on some days. The rest of the time I hoe paths and wipe sweat from my brow.

Here is what has been harvested this week.