It's Not All Bad

 I mean, look at that Bok Choy, only 3 weeks old from seed.

 More cukes from four plants than we can handle.

 Herbs, herbs, herbs.

And the savanna prairie is coming together -all this from seed scattered in the icy depth of winter.

Infestans

Had you asked me one week ago, before my excursion to New York City, about my tomatoes, I would have told you how wonderful they look, not a blemish, not a spot, so much growth if but a little slow to produce. The weather had been perfect -mid eighties daily, mid sixties nightly, occasional rains, some quite heavy, but spaced well enough to dry the soil and leaves consistently.

But you did not ask me a week ago, you asked me today, after temperature and moisture have acted in concert to produce a bloom of quick death, the ebola of tomatoes, a harshly sudden and lethal affliction with the curious botanic moniker P. infestans, late blight.

We can only watch as the plant withers, top and bottom, leaves, stems and fruit. Picking from this blackened tangle of vines is like stealing from the dead; the experience of tomato too close to mush and slime, one picked from this vine makes an appetite for it tarnished, rotten.  

It will be only a matter of days, maybe by this weekend, that the once strong will be blackened and slumped. I will watch them die and think about what little control we have over life, the one we wish for and the life we wish away.

The tomato patch after severe cleaning.

August Regis Portendat

I chose not to photograph, or rather attempt to photograph, today's eclipse. A little roughed up from a work trip drive to New York, then a delayed flight that had me return to Minnesota at four ayem Saturday. The body seems to lag behind the return, so for three days after there is a sluggishness. This final day is a good day, then, for a solar eclipse. Cosmological events were often held in more superstitious times to be portents of revolution and other negatively viewed events. It's hard to say what the 2017 eclipse portends, other than my time in our woods with camera to photograph perpendicular to the rays of our sun.