Only one of the sunflowers toppled, and it looks OK tied up. The last sunflower is starting to open. There have been a lot of bumble bees on them. Hope they can pollinate lots of seeds. My memories are of honey bees doing that job, but that is no longer happening here. The flower heads turned downward while it was raining. I heard at one of the booths at the farmer’s market yesterday morning that their gauge registered almost 4 inches of rain since it started over the weekend.
Yesterday I picked the first Heritage red raspberry from the plants in the yard. There was a second one ripe this morning. I am hoping it isn’t too damp for them.
On last night’s walk with Bode, we discovered that there were lots of gnats swarming. Maybe they had been waiting for the rain to emerge? We went by the river, which was high but didn’t look like it was flooding. Guess we will keep our fingers crossed and hope there is some time for the sodden earth to recover before more storms come through.
The statistics we see for global warming are mostly averages. I am thinking this is a big mistake, it is the fluctuations around that average that are the killers, an entire crop can be lost in an abnormal event that only lasts a few minutes. On the average this year has been good, but in actuality we had: delayed winter, snowy spring, early summer drought, and now in late summer excessive rain.
I guess when you are separated from growing things, you get unrealistic expectations. For instance, if you do everything right by the book, your computer should work. Try running that by a farmer some time!
Scientists are still discovering the “rules” — it is not just a matter of inventing something and writing a manual. So, in the business/market centered culture, they come over a wishy-washy if they speak the truth, especially when honest enough to admit that we just don’t know all the answers. Heck, a lot of the time we don’t even know if we are asking the right questions! Part of the truth is that civilization has the very real possibility of destroying a lot of the natural world before we understand it.
From years of working at a computer help desk, I can say that the majority of problems were caused by people not taking advantage of information that was readily available: RTFM. I also discovered that trying to explain what was going on frequently met with resistance. Recently Esther Dyson, a guest on Charlie Rose, suggested that what is going on in USA now is we are so wealthy and powerful that we abhor stooping to try to understand how things actually work. “Just give me results!” is the cry, don’t bother with messy details. Details are the bread and butter of scientists and engineers.
