When it gets hot, head to the fair
As I work in my garden, I’m reminded that it won’t be long until fair week. It seems early, but Shoshone and Glenns Ferry are already celebrating the approaching end of summer with county fairs and rodeos. Next week, Jerome will be celebrating, too.
I think Lincoln, Elmore and Jerome counties hold their county fairs early for people like me. While I’m busy wishing my tomatoes would ripen so I can make salsa, others around the valley are cooking up raspberries and apricots, hoping their prize preserves will bring home a blue ribbon.
There’ll be no blue ribbons for me. My garden this year is nine-tenths short of disappointing. Because of the wet spring, I had to plant my sweet corn twice. Here it is the end of July, and it’s still only 3 feet tall in spite of the large amount of water I give it weekly. It’s also pretty funny looking, tasseling out when it isn’t even as high as my knees. Midget corn, I call it, wondering if I have developed a new variety.
My two rows of peas produced enough for a couple of meals, which were delicious, but didn’t yield nearly enough to enter in the fair, and if my mother-in-law hadn’t sent over two cucumbers, I’d still be buying my cucumbers in the store. To make matters worse, my pumpkin plants act dormant, as if waiting for Cinderella’s fairy godmother to wave her wand and make them grow.
Like my friend Dixie, who starts the gardening season with a bang and then slowly loses interest as the weeds multiply faster than the vegetables, this year I’m losing enthusiasm for tending my garden. I can’t blame the weeds since I raise my vegetables in raised beds and they are easy to weed, but I do blame the heat. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about working outdoors when the temperatures continue to display triple digits. And, because the vegetables stop growing when it gets so hot, I’ve been tempted to pull up my struggling garden and feed it to my neighbor’s cows or grind it in to compost.
But then all my hard work would go unrewarded and I know from experience as soon as the weather cools down my garden will start producing again.
So maybe I’ll just take a break from gardening and go to the county fair. You’ll be sure to recognize me, I’ll be chomping on an ear of fresh corn (which I didn’t grow) or munching on a mustard-slathered corndog. Either way, I’ll be the one with the big floppy hat, sitting in the shade.
