Happy Summer Solstice

 

The high point of the year, the Summer Solstice is upon us. The sun reaches it's highest mark in the sky and begins its descent toward the south, where it will rest on the Winter Solstice.

One might say that the seed of Winter is planted today. However, we are a long way from winter. We are about to experience the hottest part of summer. Next week the highs will near 100 degrees F (37.8 C). Fortunately, today we received nearly 3 inches (7.6 cm) of rain.

Elderberry flowers

The season passes and the garden progresses through its summer cycle. The wild rose (above, not in the garden) is nearly done blooming. The elderberries shrubs have bloomed once already and a different variety is now in bloom.

Because of our warm late winter and gloriously luscious spring, many things are moving forward more quickly than usual.

The yarrow flowers are beginning to fade, whereas they usually are at their peak now.

I consider yarrow, elder flowers, roses to be the quintessential flowers of the Summer Solstice.

Yarrow

I have been neglectful of this blog, although I've been gardening like mad all along and have had many ideas to share with you. As I said, I've been in the garden for long days, which took any energy I might have had for writing. So I took advantage of this rainy day to set down some words. To celebrate the Solstice, I wanted to share some images from the garden and take you through the season.

The Asiatic lilies have dropped all their petals, but the Tiger lilies are fresh and bright. I have always thought of tiger lilies as being red-orange. Several years 

ago I bought a package of mixed colors and think these white tiger lilies are absolutely stunning. The package also had the red, as well as orange and yellow. Right now I feel partial to these white ones, however.

The season of fruiting began with strawberries (sorry, no photos) my favorite of all fruits. They were highly productive this year, starting around mid-May and ending in early June. They were accompanied by asparagus season.

The Purple Passion variety that I grow is so fat, tender and sweet. I could hardly get enough of it.

 Our favorite way of cooking and eating it is roasted. We had roasted asparagus almost every day for a few weeks, and I was still able to steam and freeze quite a bit of it. I look forward to eating asparagus this winter. I reluctantly quit harvesting it about a week ago, to let the fronds form so the leaves could feed the roots for next year's production.

That was followed by cherries. We have beautiful little Montmorency pie cherry tree that has produced every year since it began bearing fruit. The cherries, while tart, are sweet enough to eat out of hand. Not like sweet cherries, but to me better. 

With my cherry pitter, pitting them was not an onerous chore. I highly recommend getting one if you have a cherry tree.

As soon as the cherries were done, the black raspberries (no photo) were ready to pick. They did not do so well because I was so busy planting sweet potatoes that I let the raspberry sawfly larvae get out of hand. They decimated the foliage, significantly reducing fruiting. The sawfly larvae didn't cause big problems on the black raspberries last year, but they were far more numerous this year, for some reason. 

In a few days I'll cut down all the fruiting canes and hope for better next. I hope they don't get hit by the black raspberry decline virus.

And now, the blueberries are starting to ripen. The puny little bush among my strawberries just keeps going, in spite of being sorely neglected. Several years ago we decided that blueberries just were not a wise choice for Kansas. They require a lot of water, acid soil, and a little shade in summer's heat. So I took out all but the one bush and said I would only water it when I watered the strawberries. 

And it hung on. This year it is loaded with berries. Perhaps this is its final hurrah and it will give up after this. Or maybe it will cling to life. I will find out next year.