It's truly the dog days of summer. Temperatures at 98 F and humidity at 90%. The entire body wilts upon contact with the outer air. We're living indoors, hopping out only to check the chickens and move some sprinklers. Yes, amazingly, we're still drought-ful (-7" from normal last month alone) and the rains which keep the humidity up seem determined to skip over our farm. Just enough drops fall to maintain the hot, clammy humidity.
The lovely pigeon has gone on to other haunts. Perhaps home at last? I believe that he may have been in love with our beautiful, tiny Japanese banty hen and left in despair when that affection was not returned. It might have been - he was lovely, after all, but she was a bit distracted with the 4 (now 3) chicks pestering around her feet.
Only one or two figs are ripe yet. Can the dry weather be delaying harvest? At least the signs of fireblight that showed up on the spring growth that was late freeze damaged has not continued, so perhaps the dry June-July period stalled its progress. These fungal things never truly die, they just become dormant. At least in latency they are not causing more damage. It is quite tricky moving everything to a mostly-organic regimen. Organics require that one practice preventive practices -- you are restricting yourself from using those easy "silver-bullet" chemicals that can wipe out those things you missed treating at the proper time.
For the first time in our farm history, we actually found a bagworm on the loquats! With a nice bagworm bag created out of cleverly munched bits of fuzzy loquat leaf. Eriobotrya is NOT a normal bagworm-affected genus, as far as I've ever seen. They should be on needled things like the Leyland Cypress hedge on the north side of the farm, which has been completely infected this summer thanks to our neighbors discouragingly infested evergreens. (Now we will have to go to war with Bt sprays next May and June, relentlessly, if we hope to save the trees at all.) More fun for everyone.
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