I love this hot-color coleus, don't love but am learning to live with these hot-hot days. 106 yesterday, maybe cooler today as the high pressure that's been keeping the lid on the Texas hot-plate drifts slowly off to the west. The last thirty days: the hottest ever, EVER, since records have been kept in Austin. No wonder my beans are sulking. Blossoms, but no pods. Even the eggplants (a tropical nightshade, climatized for hot weather) aren't setting fruit. If you have that problem, too, I found some ideas here. Basically, though, we just have to wait for the end of this heat, probably another 30-45 days.
But the best news is El Nino. Computer models for October/November/December, JFM 2010, and AMJ 2010 show above-normal rainfall for CenTX. Even getting back to normal would be a blessing: above-normal seems almost unimaginable. Two years of 15" annual rainfall spells disaster for local gardeners, farmers, ranchers.
Working on the revisions to Extraordinary Year, staying cool, knitting a sock for an hour in the evening, watching a film (last night, Doubt, which I absolutely loved and will watch for a second time tonight), currently reading Cadillac Desert, which I ought to have read years ago but somehow didn't, and thinking about water resources and the Texas aquifers, especially the Ogallala, which we cross when we drive to New Mexico. The nation depends on the croplands that have been supported by this aquifer, but the fossil water there will be gone in a matter of decades. Another of the changes (along with climate change and energy depletion) that our children and grandchildren will be learning to live with.
Reading note. The irrigation of the Ogallala region, which has occurred almost entirely since the Second World War, is, from a satellite's point of view, one of the most profound changes visited by man on North America; only urbanization, deforestation, and the damming of rivers surpass it.--Mark Reisner, Cadillac Desert
