Weekly journal of a Midwest gardener, which includes mowing, reading, weeding, a bit of harvesting, and still wishing for rain.
Monday, August 25, 2025
Whoever ordered today’s weather gets a gold star from me. Mild, sunny, though there was that brief moment when I finally started trimming and mowing the lawn in the afternoon, when a dark cloud sailed by and briefly paused. I was torn between wishing we might get a bit of rain, which we need, but also wanting to mow the lawn. A terrible position for a gardener to find herself in! Should I pause and wait?1 Keep going and hope? Hope for what? Rain? Sunshine? I kept going, and we didn’t get a single drop of rain. I finished mowing under partly sunny skies.2
Tuesday, August 26, 2025
Such a low temperature in the morning, it surely must have broken a record? Well, not that close since the official low was 54F and the record was 48F set in 1945.3 Since I could feel that hint of fall in the air, I planted the mums I bought last week, along with the new honeyberry and a white tall phlox, plus those Cool Wave pansies. Then I wrote a blog post about “plantcrastination” which is when people buy plants and then let them sit and sit and sit before they finally plant them out or pot them up.4
Wednesday, August 27, 2025
I headed out in the cool of the morning and had intended to weed in The Vegetable Garden Cathedral, but then I took a winding route through one of the big borders and ended up cutting back and weeding as I went. By the time I got back to the veg garden, I had just enough time to weed out the strawberry bed and along one fence.5 I finished with a full-to-the-top bag of weeds. As I was leaving the backyard, I found a corn cob on the ground up by the gate and knew that meant raccoons were starting to harvest my Glass Gem ornamental corn, so I hustled back to the veg garden and picked some of the riper ears. So pretty!6
Thursday, August 28, 2025
This morning, I headed straight to the Vegetable Garden Cathedral with blinders on. No stopping here, there, or over yonder to pull a weed or snip a bloom. With great focus, I cleaned up five of six raised beds and harvested onions, a handful of green beans, assorted peppers, and a scant few tomatoes as I went.7 I also said goodbye to the cucumber vines and some grossly overgrown kale and turnip greens. I finished up my morning in the garden by watering all the containers. Later in the morning, the heavens opened up and sent some rain.8
Friday, August 29, 2025
I enjoyed another round of weeding early in the morning. I started with mulberry weeds lurking behind the peonies, moved on to bindweed trying to strangle some shrubs, and finished with grasses that were threatening to turn the long border of annual flowers in The Vegetable Garden Cathedral into a tall-grass prairie. After lunch, I went back to Court’s Yard and Greenhouse and bought flats of violas and pansies for fall planting.9 Since I was all clean for the rest of the day, I put my flower purchases on the porch to plant out tomorrow.
Saturday, August 30, 2025
So much of gardening seems to involve weeding. We plant. We weed. We water. We weed. We mow. We weed. We prune. We weed. I decided that weeding would not define my time in the garden today, like it had for most of the week. I gardened mostly in front, clearing out some summer annuals that had seen better days and replacing them with the pansies and violas.10
Sunday, August 31, 2025
I headed out to the garden to see if there were any tomatoes to pick and came back in with a large handful of cherry tomatoes. A few of them are “close, but not quite ripe,” so I’ll leave them on the kitchen counter for a while to ripen, next to the onions I harvested and cleaned a few days ago. Yes, I did have to toss a few half-eaten tomatoes onto the compost pile, but they were mostly green. It seems like even the raccoons are desperate for a good, ripe tomato.11
That’s a Week!
For many people, the end of August is the end of summer. It’s not the end for me! I’m going to act like there are three more weeks of summer because, technically, there are three more weeks or so until the autumnal equinox. When is it this year? I looked it up for you. The autumnal equinox is Monday, September 22, 2025, at 2:19 P.M. EDT. Mark your calendars. Or read this newsletter every week because I’ll remind you again when we get closer to the true end of summer. Until then, keep summer going! Don’t squash it under a faux (or real) pumpkin on your front porch. Hold off on scenting your house with pumpkin spice and absolutely skip that pumpkin spice latte until it’s truly fall.
Quotable
“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?” - Vita Sackville-West
Have a great gardening week!
Need I tell you once again? Even if it looks like it might rain, we do not wait to find out if it actually will rain. We keep going. We don’t stop unless we get wet from rain. Then we decide if it is just a pause for a brief shower, or an all-out soaking rain before we truly throw in the trowel, hang up our rake, and run, pushing the lawnmower, for cover.
While mowing on Monday, I finished listening to The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright (1941). Yes, it is a children’s story, but one well told, and I enjoyed it too!
It’s fun to know about record temperatures for any given day. I use the Time and Date site to find them for my city.
I’m thinking about posting my blog posts on Substack in a new section as well as on my blog. It should make it easier for me to manage subscriptions, I think. What do you think?
While working in the garden Tuesday and Wednesday, I listened to Somthing to Look Forward To by Fannie Flag (2025). It’s a series of interconnected short stories. It was fun to hear Fannie narrate the audiobook.
I tossed some gardening clothes in the washer on Wednesday after my big weeding time and proceeded to fix a late breakfast. When I sat down, I realized the washer was being too quiet—the kind of quiet a toddler makes when doing something naughty like playing with matches. As soon as I went into the laundry room, I could smell something burning, so I unplugged the washer and called the repair guy, who came at lunchtime. Diagnosis: The motor overheated. Repair guy will install a new motor sometime next week, as one does for a 25-year-old washer. Also, a gold star for me because I emptied all the water out of the washer before he arrived.
It’s so embarrassing to have to buy tomatoes in the summertime when one has a vegetable garden, but between the weather and the raccoons, it has been a less-than-stellar year for tomatoes. One must do what one must do. I just hope no one saw me with those cherry tomatoes in my cart at Costco.
We only got 0.07 inches of rain, so the heavens didn’t exactly open up. It was more of a little crack that seeped out a bit of moisture. I’ll take it!
They don’t grow the fall pansies and violas at my favorite little greenhouse like they do the spring violas and pansies. I think they mostly get a few flats to sell in the fall because they know I’ll buy some!
I don’t plant near as many pansies and violas in the late summer/fall as I do in the spring. Partly because I find them to be a bit trickier in the fall. They don’t like hot days, and they don’t like to be overwatered. I can sort of control the overwatering part, but not the hot days. I’ll likely lose some to root rot, but those that survive will bloom long into the fall.
Mid-winter I feel the same buying eggs as you felt buying tomatoes.