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bumblebees on plantago Wednesday, August 4 2010
Every morning when I wake up, I put teapot water on a gas burner in preparation for my morning French press of coffee. Then I either pay a visit to my brownhouse or go and look at the tomato patches to see how many tomatoes have turned red during the night. We're still far from peak tomato in our two patches, though we're getting almost enough to satisfy normal tomato needs (both in terms of large sliceable tomatoes and cherry tomatoes). I've been getting up earlier of late, usually around 7 or 8, at an hour when the the grass is covered with dew and there's some residual night chill in the air. This is when the bumblebees like to gather pollen from the Plantago lanceolata flowers, which to them are like tall skinny palm trees. A bumblebees land on a flower and its weight bows it down nearly to the ground. Then the bee flies off and the flower rebounds. You can see this happening everywhere on recent cool dewy mornings between the tomato patches.
The weather has gradually turned hot again. It's still about ten degrees cooler than that brutal period in early July, but it doesn't take much to break into a drenching sweat.
As has been the pattern of late, it fell to me to pick up our CSA vegetables today, giving Gretchen a rare period of alone time during which I am not coming and going and talking in falsetto to the creatures. (I'd been sensitized to her finding this distracting, so I'd taken to whispering instead. But of course she finds that distracting too.)
Our CSA has become less and less useful as summer has gone on. Today we got three more squashes, though I'd never gotten around to cooking up the one we'd kept from last week. We also got green peppers for the first time this week, something I like but which Gretchen has little use for. Then of course there was kale, though we've hardly made a dent in the abundant kale growing in our own garden. We should be happy that our CSA has still failed to produce any tomatoes, though these would have been more welcome than squash.
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