Too Tired for a Rain Dance

 

I ate the first ear of corn from the garden this afternoon.  It always seems to me to be a kind of ceremony that should be accompanied by at least a trumpet or two, if not an entire marching band.  Instead of a marching band, I had Scout, who accompanied me to the garden.  I’m thinking he can take credit, whether he realizes it or not, for the fact that raccoons have not torn down any corn yet this year. Since the corn has started to make, I have been leaving the garden gate open and Bear and Scout have spent most of the nights outside on patrol.  A couple of raccoons can destroy a patch of corn in one night, left undisturbed.

I’ve been inspecting the corn twice a day for the last few days and this afternoon, I found one ear with darkened and dry silks that just might be ready to eat.  So, I pulled it and held my breath while I pulled back the shucks.  It was perfect.  I cooked it, buttered it, and ate it standing over the sink.  For good measure, I had a tomato sandwich and ate that standing over the sink too.  I have found that many of the best things to eat are messy, and certainly the best tomatoes are apt to drip juice when eaten between slices of bread with mayonnaise. 

 

The garden has been struggling this year.  We planted it fairly early and it was blessed with a couple of good rains just afterwards.  The temperature was a little cool those first few weeks and some of the peppers and tomatoes didn’t make it.  Two of my four okra plants disappeared into thin air and my favorite variety of peas didn’t come up at all.  The two okra plants that remain are the strangest okra plants I’ve ever seen.  That are not even knee high.  Usually they are as tall as me by now.   They have tiny okra pods that double in size overnight, but I have to bend over to pick it.   

 Just after the first of June, the rain stopped and the temperature climbed into three digits, more like July or August than June.  The tomatoes began to suffer and the peppers stopped growing.  There are bright spots though. The beans produced enough to fill up all the empty jars we could find, there is a bountiful crop of purple hull peas ripening and what looks like will be a plentiful supply of corn. The squash is undeterred by the heat and drought.  But I realized I had to water the tomatoes if I wanted to save them.  Thus began the saga of the hoses.

There are two water faucets on the house, one at the back and one near the front.  One is on the northeast corner and the other is on the northwest corner.  The garden is on the south side of the house.  That was not good planning, in my opinion.  I have a long, contentious relationship with hoses.  Cheap hoses, expensive hoses, non-kink hoses, short hoses, long hoses – it doesn’t matter what kind they are; they seldom last more than one summer and they always seem to leak at one end or the other.  I have even more trouble with nozzles, which never seem to fit just right and always leak.  It’s a little like my problems with weed-eaters, which never survive past the first time I need to change or add string. 

I already had two hoses at the front of the house, used for watering flowers.  All I thought I needed was a soaker hose and one more short hose to reach the garden.  Off to the hardware store I went.  As I left the store with my hoses, I had the thought that these were going to be pretty expensive tomatoes.  Little did I know.

I spent a sweaty hour running the soaker hose through the tomato plants, trying to get it in just the right spot for optimum watering.  Midway through the job, I thought about how nice the tomatoes were at the farmers market.  Of course, it lacked about 6 inches reaching the very last plant, but I thought I could water it from a bucket.  I hooked everything up, turned on the water and sat on the porch while it did its thing.  Mission accomplished and I went to bed that night secure in the knowledge that the tomatoes would surely survive.

I think I mentioned that Scout has been staying outside to guard the corn. He had never bothered the hoses, which I usually left spread out in the yard.  But the next morning, I found my new hose in several sections and one of my very best other hoses with a big hole in it.  Scout was lying in the yard, happily pulling the stuffing out of a porch cushion.  “Bad dog,” I said sternly.  Scout grinned a Collie grin and let me take the cushion away from him.  I stuffed as much fluff back inside as I could and, grumbling, planned another trip to the hardware store.

This time I bought a really long new hose.  My thinking was that I would eliminate one of the existing hoses and do away with one of the connections, which always leaked anyway.  While I was there, I bought a little repair kit. I looked hopefully at the weather forecast but there was no rain in sight. I'm too tired for a rain dance. I was sweating again by the time I unrolled and hooked up the new hose and watered the tomatoes again.  A long hose weighs a lot more than a short hose.  This time I didn’t take any chances.  I rolled the thing back up and neatly tucked the end underneath so Scout couldn’t get to it.  The tomatoes are rapidly becoming more and more expensive.

The next afternoon, there was still no rain in the forecast so I dragged the hose back around and hooked it up again.  It was still hot, even in the later evening, so I went back into the house to cool off.  About 30 minutes later, I went outside and noticed a steady shower coming from an area where there should not be a shower.  A hole had appeared in the brand-new hose and Scout was once again pulling stuffing out of another porch cushion.  In addition, the little solar powered fountain that was in the bird bath was lying on the ground with chew marks all along the edge.  “Bad dog,” I said sternly, as I took the cushion and stuffed as much stuff back inside as I could. I have no proof that Scout made the hole in the hose, but the circumstantial evidence is strong.

I don’t know why Scout has suddenly developed a fixation with hoses.  It could be that he feels a lack of attention because of his brood of nine puppies, or because Sophie still won’t let him play with them.  He looks at them from a few feet away and whines, and if he can catch Sophie outside he jumps in their wading pool and licks each one. 

The biggest crisis was when she came in the house and caught him at it – she cornered him next to the wall and he couldn’t get out.  He thought he was going to die that day. The puppies are thriving and growing and beginning to open their eyes.  Pretty soon they will have to go outside.  I’m sure Scout has plans to teach them all his tricks.  I hope it starts raining soon because I’m not sure the water hoses will survive.