Borage

The thoughts and images in this article inspire pre-dawn work on that soil I mentioned yesterday. We do not have the heat here that she does there, but the nudge to go out in the dark is welcome. My attention has been solely focused on regeneration below for the coffee that once  thrived above ground. Time to start thinking of accent colors and other edibles:

Stokes asters

What You Discover When You Garden at Night

Daytime heat forced a writer with a green thumb to change her routine. She found unexpected pleasures.

When it’s too hot to garden during the day, what is there to do but garden at night? Neither floppy hat nor gobs of sunscreen will lure me into the glare of a hot and humid, possibly record-breaking, 90-plus-degree day. Or, as our local meteorologist reports: one with a heat index of 103. So instead, I venture out into the garden after dinner, dogs in tow, surveying the raised beds in the coolness of evening.

Poppies that have gone to seed, bringing to mind “the coming glory of red, white, and pink blooms” next season.

I carry a basket full of seeds, green string to tie the tomatoes higher, and wooden stakes and black markers to record once again what I have sown, some new crops and others a repeat of those planted earlier in the season. It is midsummer now and the lettuce, radishes, and shallots are fading, but the basil and tomatoes, beans and zucchini are finally coming into their own. A little more rain and warmth and I will be able to make my first tomato sandwich, one of the driving forces, no doubt, behind planting a vegetable garden.

At dusk, a hush settles over the garden and reminds me of a time when I did not speak during a meditation dinner at a retreat some years ago. Eating without speaking made me notice details I would have missed had I been babbling: who wore a wedding ring, what morsels people left scattered on their plates. Even the food tasted different. My garden in the evening is somewhat the same.

Without the brilliance and the chatter of the day, the competing noises, the busyness and the hurry, my little plot is a deeper level of quiet, maybe even more peaceful. As much as I adore the daily refrain of eastern towhees, Carolina wrens, and baby red-tailed hawks on their first flights, screaming “Ma! Ma! Look at me!,” many of the feathered creatures on this farm are calling it a day, too. The bees have gone quiet as well, having finished their daily sipping of borage, an herb I allow to self-sow just for them…

Read the whole story here.