Unseasonable Seasons

I commented to Martha that it is only April and we may already have had more hot weather than we did all last summer.

Last summer was a time of cools and wets and sloshes and overcast drearies ... and of course it was a year when we were crazily growing great jungles of tomato vines.

Our vines, typical in their preference for a bit of balmy heat and a lot of summery highs, banded together and handed us a petition demanding that somewhere in the mix of springlike and autumnal days we slip in a few hours, here and there, of torrid summer. Recalcitrantly, we refused. The last thing you want to do, as a gardener, is to give in to your tomato plants. True, I had nurtured hopes of advancing further into the mysteries of tomato wines, that year ... but you must stand by your principles. Just to show them who were the gardeners -- and who, the gardened -- we reserved the balmiest days of year 2009 for the period after the first frosts -- and then laughed with hectic glee that we had not bothered to protect a one of them, but had let them all slump over, frost-slaughtered to the very last pathetic one, by those first few freezes.

Of course, we had been rendered insane by that time -- by a lack of tomatoes ... a mental disturbance common among gardeners living through a summer of overcast drearies. But how were we to know that, at the time?

Cheers ...