tamarack

only here ... we want to dismiss summer. It was Aug 4 the other day and I read someone suggesting it's almost over because a swamp maple tinged.. ah..yeeeah To be fair, that was merely an observation, and only of a phenomenon that usually has begun at/before August 10. A couple red maples near the little farm pond down the road from home were nicely colored by this past weekend - as is the usual for the date. Any "almost over" suggestions have been added by the reader, or involve mindreading capability.

I think that practice was a tip (pun intended) from "Crockett's Victory Garden."

All season long I cut off the side stems to keep the plants to a single stem. Over the weekend I cut off the topmost growth shoot so the plants will no longer attempt to lengthen. Will need to do more shoot pruning as the plants keep trying to extend the vine.

Low 40s at my place this morning after yesterday's max of 73. Started nipping the tops off the cherry tomato vines so the already-set fruit has a better chance of ripening before frost. (Oops - should not have dropped the "f"-bomb, might cause distress for the ADATT folks.)

It's rather comical at this point. Spend all this money for lawn looks, and have a field to look at. Will need to drill another well to get any real irrigation, but that's a very costly project. I don't think I've seen it look this bad I wouldn't recommend tossing $10K at a new well just for the lawn, especially since that granite block on which you sit may not yield any more for from hole #2 than from #1. Garden explosion. Cukes are sweet as heck. Basil gone wild. BGW. Only fail so far has been green beans. Made a pesto with basil, garlic, olive oil and pine nuts. Off the hook Our garden is about 180° from yours, so far. Cukes haven't even blossomed while last year we were giving them away, while the green beans are in full production. I plant them sequentially over a 5-week period because we much prefer them uncooked, but we sometimes get overwhelmed and blanch a bunch for the freezer - may happen again in the next couple weeks. Cherry tomatoes almost ready for the pick to start, and I've begun nipping off the tops so the fruit already started gets all the plants' efforts. Goal is to ripen all the fruit before frost rather than grow bigger vines and try to do the indoors ripening with hundreds of greenies rather than the couple dozen we get even with top-stopping.

My honeybee adventure cam at age 4, and I have no memory of it beyond my mom's account. The house next to her parent's summer place in NNJ had a huge honeybee colony within the building's inside corner. Early one morning, probably before anyone else was awake, I wandered into the odd-sounding area. I'm sure my screams awakened everyone, my mom said my hands swelled up as big as hers (she was 5'4" and petite, but still...) and I slept for 30 straight hours. Was never told how many stingers they had to pull out, but if I'd done that with a yellowjacket nest I'd have slept for a lot longer.

His story reminded me of my grandmother's encounter with yellowjackets while raking leaves in the yard of their lake community home, and your "venom" comment added to the memory. She felt the "fire" on her legs, looked down to see them nearly covered. Tried to sweep the little monsters off but they wouldn't let go. Fortunately she was less than 50 yards from the lake. At the Dr. or Hosp. (happened before I was born, so some details I don't know) they counted 70 stings on one leg and 90 on the other - on a woman who weighed at most 110 lb. Back to weather: After the sunniest month I've recorded here, August is 3-for-3 and not much cloudiness on tap for tomorrow/Monday. May dip to low 40s that day. Finally me clouds mid-week.

If that's real, I'd be interested in the chemical mechanism causing the damage. Glyphosate's mode of action in plants is to prevent formation of an amino acid essential for photosynthesis, a process rarely performed by either bees or people. That amino acid is one never produced by animal life. In other unsettling news, I visited the Climod site to add the July data to sites for which I have records, and found that the Farmington co-op abruptly stopped reporting on the 17th and thru month's end. This is the site's first missed data since March 1970 (entire month msg), and before that one must go back to 1913 to find more gaps. The observer is well into his 80s, so I view the data stoppage with foreboding.

Haven't seen anyone saying the full month won't be AN. Maybe I missed it. However, I think it will be less AN than was July.

August 10 is the day my average daily mean is below 65.00 for the first time since July 8. And while on average August is cooler and less dewy than July, the memory of 1988 shows that things can be different. The first 2 weeks that month were as hot/dewy as any 2-week period I've experienced since moving to Maine. During the first week PWM set a new TD mark at 77°, though I'm not sure it remains at the top.

Had an 8-week stretch that "summer" (early June-early August) with only 7 days that it didn't rain. Coolest July of 22 here, 2nd coolest June and coolest met summer despite AN August (in which sun and convective precip finally appeared.)

Should see some color there before 8/15, a month before much change in anything else.

Probably by a factor of about 10 every 3 weeks or so. In 2-3 months a solo queen can bring the nest to a thousand or more. When I lived on the farm I torched one and then dug out the mammoth 4 foot by 3 foot nest. Insane What a giant! Fortunately, in the instance noted above, there was no dig needed, only fill as the burnout was total.

Wait for the next sub-60 morning and get them at first light. I'd use one of those long-distance wasp killer sprays, from 4-5 feet away. If none come out in response, plop a rock on the hole big enough to block it, so the chemical is trapped with the insects. The year that paper wasps colonized the rock wall along our driveway (3 stings for me and 5 for my wife), I picked a 50° morning to flip the rock under which they'd nested, and got plenty of juice on them before any became airborne - and none made it more than 2 feet from the nest. My dad used to do the gasoline method at our grandparents' summer place with it's 3/4-acre lawn that averaged 2-3 nests per mowing. He'd go out in late evening, dump the half cup and light it. On one particularly large nest (judged by swarm size when disturbed, there was a washtub-size hole in the ground the next morning.

Too small for yellowjackets. Ginx is probably correct, and there are many such species native to our region.

Most ground-nesting bees are solitary, with bumblebees an exception and I'm sure you would already know if yours were bumblebees. Another possibility is yellowjackets, especially if there are numerous critters going in and out. Those beasts are the most aggressive of the social wasps, IMO and in my (oft-stung) experience.

Measured 6.41" at my (then) Gardiner home, greatest calendar-day rain event I've recorded. Bob was also the only TC of my experience in which the backside winds were essentially the same speed as frontside, though over 90% of the precip came before the switch. PWM had a bit over 8" with several Cumberland County bridges blown out. That was their biggest one-day rain until the October 1996 hybrid storm dumped 12" on them.

More importantly (since they may have already bred by beechnut time), they make the bears fat.

I'd go with witch hazel for the left leaf. Their seeds mature in early fall and get forcefully ejected, sometimes falling 20 feet or more from mama. Witch hazel is a woody shrub that rarely gets over 20' tall. And you're correct about beech - their nuts grow in a spiky 3-panel package about 1/2" diameter, with a single triangular nut within a hard-to-remove hull. Quite tasty straight from the hull, though one might starve to death trying to free them from their covering. Kind of like celery - chewing that veggie takes more calories than it provides. Of course, if one eats beechnuts like a bear, spiky covering, hulls and all (and as fast as they can get crammed into the bear's mouth) the energy budget is more favorable. At least in Maine, bear reproduction is keyed to beechnut crops; lots in the fall, many cubs in the spring.

Looks more like a basswood. Aspen blossoms/flowers are long gone, generally before the leaves are fully formed. Basswoods near our house are full of flowers.

Topped out at 86 yesterday, a bit less hot than I'd anticipated. Dropped into the upper 60s this morning.

13" at my place, only 10"+ Novie event I've seen.

Or bitternut - leaflets look sufficiently narrow. In CT there are probably 4-5 different native hickories; in Maine there are 2 (shagbark and bitternut) and I've never seen any non-planted ones other than shagbark. And probably most of the hickories native to the US could survive that climate once established.

The 4:30 AM coyote alarm has been repeated several times over the past 2 weeks - they set up just beyond our informal pet cemetery perhaps 100 yards from the house and have a songfest. One evening they were much closer, probably within 20 yards, could hear their feet on the leaves. Sometimes it sounds as if there are 2 families instead of the usual one. Since losing a cat for the 3rd time (fisher or coyote, though to the cat it makes no difference) we keep the felines inside.

I've been amazed at how much sapsucker damage a tree can sustain and yet survive with a full crown. Those pics are high end damage for sure, but I've seen basswood and yellow birch nearly as bad - the birch usually stitched with much straighter rows. I'd leave it alone and watch the crown to see if there's dieback. Any control/repellant is apt to be costly and probably would require frequent repeats.