At Midsummer

If you consider summer to start on June 1 rather than May's Memorial Day weekend, we are currently in midsummer. Today, a rare not-so-humid day, I took a walk around my yard to see how things are doing.

The early spring flowers are a distant memory. The azaleas, irises and rhododendron have bloomed and busted, the lily flowers gone while the stems remain.

I put seeds from three different types of plants into a pot, and only the zinnias are growing. I had collected the seeds from a friend's plant last fall, and will do it again this fall with these flowers once they are done.

Hummingbird-attracting canna flower (Margo D. Beller)

The purple coneflowers have finally started to open. The midseason goldenrod is in flower. Rose of sharon shrubs are blooming purple in neighbor yards but the pale pink flowering type I have are just starting to bud, as are the succulent sedums protected by the deer fencing. Some of the potted cannas have put up long spikes of red flowers that, witnessed at least once by my husband, attracted a female ruby-throated hummingbird. (I hope she gets to the backyard where the feeder hangs waiting for her.)

The house wren young are now so noisy when a parent comes to feed them that I can hear their begging through the closed windows of the porch, even with the fan on. They are so big the parents feed them from outside the box, except when they squeeze in to remove poop. I expect that, like the brood earlier this summer, there are three birds in the box and they will soon be enticed to leave and follow their parents, learning to feed themselves. If they survive they'll head south and the box will come down for the year.

The humidity has affected me more than usual this year, starting with the heavy spring rains. I used to wonder how those living in New Orleans could survive the humidity. Now I know - you close the windows, put on the air conditioner, close the curtains against the sun and stay inside as the air dries along with my skin, just as it does in the winter when the furnace is continually running. And don't look at the electric bill until absolutely necessary.

But at least the gnats are gone from my porch. Unlike last year when I didn't start noticing them until August and found they had infested the open bag of bird seed, they have nothing to breed on. The seed is in a locked container. Old plastic pots are gone. Soil is off the porch. What ceramic pots I've kept are covered with plastic. If a gnat was desperate enough it would visit the yellow sticky strip, where there are already a number of corpses. My hope is the wrens and other baby birds are eating the overflow.

This month the cicadas started calling during the day, the fireflies have been out in the evenings and soon there will be night choruses of katydids and crickets.

In the cooler early morning I have been hearing a number of different types of birds, besides the resident house wrens. I hear families of titmice and chickadees. Mockingbirds harried a pair of fish crows that seemed interested in nesting in my trees. (They left.) A catbird sang for the longest time atop my yew hedge in the mornings, but now its young are gone and the bird has moved on. It is not yet August but already some birds are heading south for the winter feeding grounds, such as the shorebirds that stop off at some of New Jersey's shore empoundments (along with the nasty, biting, greenhead flies). 

From 2020, a house wren feeding young from outside the box.
(Margo D. Beller)

Warblers are starting to move south. They won't be as colorful as in spring and won't be singing their territorial songs. They will be harder to find.

Leaves are already falling from some of the trees, but not the apple tree. Cutting off that rotted limb seems to have done it some good. The dogwood I saved two years ago is showing green fruits that will eventually redden and, I hope, draw robins and cedar waxwings before the squirrels can get at them.

Back-to-school ads on TV tell me it will soon be time for the kids currently on vacation to hit the books (and their after-school activities) again. It is already darker in the early morning. Soon enough it will be dark in the early evening, too.

I'll put the garden to bed and the seed feeders out for the cardinals and other birds hanging around my yard during the winter. Then another year will end, as it inevitably does.

 

Pre-Autumn Colors

Coleus, coneflower and euonymous bushes
protected by deer netting. (Margo D. Beller)

At this time of year it is hard to deny summer is finally ending.

Labor Day has been and gone. Children are either back in school or in their homes doing their learning remotely because of the continued coronavirus pandemic. It is now dark until about 6:15 a.m. and is dark again around 7 p.m. Even on warm days the evenings and overnights are cool enough to keep the air conditioner off. Several times this week the temperature will dip into the 40s for the first time in months.

Perhaps the best sign of autumn's approach is to see what is growing in the garden. It's more enjoyable to look around now that I've finished with my weeding. The late summer heat diminished the coreopsis, the coneflower and the daisies. However, now the garden is full of pinks and purples from the Rose of Sharons, the liriopes, the sedums and the big pot of 4 coleus plants I had indoors over the winter, and which grew and filled in with the summer heat.

Peppers on plant, 2020 (Margo D. Beller)

There are other colors. The green of the viburnum is contrasted with the red berries growing where the flowers were too high to be browsed by deer. The berries will be eaten by birds, I hope, rather than squirrels. There are a number of green peppers that started coming in with the late-summer heat and are now very slowly turning red enough for me to pick and use. Until recently there were tomatoes ripening to gold. But now chipmunks have picked off the small, green fruits and I've brought what's left of them inside.

The green lawn is looking lusher now that it isn't being blasted by intense heat. But when MH does not get to mowing it, the long grass hosts other plants, in this case some of the nearby sensitive ferns and small locust trees growing from the root of one or more of the trees at the curb. I do not care to dig up the yard so I must depend on MH's mowing or me cutting these mini trees down with a lopper.

Rose of Sharon, a favorite with bees
(Margo D. Beller)

The birds are in transition, too. I have seen no hummingbirds at that feeder since Aug. 31. They are on the move south. Now that nesting is over and the young have left, some of the yard birds are making noise again. The cardinal calls "teek!" as it flies around the backyard, waking me at first light, and I am reminded it will soon be time to put out the feeders. Titmice are coming to the water dishes and there is still a catbird calling from the bushes. The catbird will be gone by winter. On those mornings I can make myself get up in the dark and get out to look for them, there are warblers in their autumnal coloring and other birds I haven't seen since spring, all heading south for the winter.

Unlike the spring birds, these fall migrants are mainly silent, which means I must work harder to find them as they dart around in treetops feeding on insects after a long flight to my area from their northern breeding grounds. When I can find them I am pleased, especially if I can identify them. It doesn't make it easier that I must now contend with floaters in my left eye that make me think there is something flying above me when there isn't.

There are also raptors. They migrate, too and, unlike the smaller birds, they travel by day on the warm winds called thermals that rise off ridges and mountains. The hawk watchers have been been busy doing their counting since August, and I have been lucky to see hawks, eagles, accipiters and ospreys.

Joe-Pye weed, goldenrod, ferns at Tempe Wick Reserve,
Mendham Township, NJ 2020 (Margo D. Beller)

Of course, the most obvious sign of autumn's approach is the leaves starting to color. The dogwood's are going red, the apple tree has been losing leaves since the apples stopped in June and there are plenty of little yellow leaves in the street, on the lawn and tracked into the house from the locust trees. Soon the oaks, maples and elms will drop their colorful leaves and MH and I will be out with rake and tarp. So far I have not seen many locust pods so I am hopeful that, as with the apple tree this spring, this won't be a year of plenty.

I will enjoy all these garden colors for as long as possible, but I know that, inevitably, winter will return, too.