Design

Field crickets are singing loudly tonight, clearly in great numbers based on the volume. I can't say it's melodious, since it's basically one call over and over. But it's remarkably loud, and it fills the night, so we're surrounded with warm humid air and the shu-shu two note calls, over and over. It's the sound of southern summer nights in the Eastern U.S.

Southern evenings, especially in the transition from day to dusk to night, are filled with sound; cicadas and day-singing crickets give way to evening-singing crickets, katydids, and tree frogs. I love the nocturnal symphony . Distinguishing between them takes some study . I've been working on it for awhile (although perhaps not diligently enough!) Lang Elliot's The Sounds of Insects is loaded on the main iPod, but I need to put it on the small one that I take walking or when I'm in the garden. It's not the first thing I'd think about listening to, though, I'm afraid. There's definitely an instructive aspect to trying to listen to sequences of insect calls that isn't that appealing, but maybe it's just a new language to learn. I just had to look up whether it was cicadas or katydids that called during the day (they have similar loud raspy calls), but I'm beginning to be able to hear the differences between tree frogs and the different specie...

It's not summer yet, but it's sounding like it; the warm evenings are bringing sounds of crickets and tree frogs. There's a bullfrog calling from the small pond in the Terrace Garden near my office as I leave work, and other frogs in another pond near the parking lot. The evenings have been delightful; maybe a little humid, but yesterday was downright cool for mid-May. Our garden is lush with green; it's a wonderful respite from the droughty springs of most of the last decade, especially last year, and the year before. In the Satellite Garden, garlic, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and squash of all sorts are growing rapidly. The planted hay bales are an experiment -- they'll definitely need more watering than I'm used too, and more additional nutrients from slow-release organic fertilizer. In the main vegetable garden (where the nematode experiment is still underway), a huge butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) has defied my rooting-out eff...

Close to the summer solstice, our evenings outside stretch past 9 pm; I've just now come in at a quarter-past nine. Our northerly neighbors have later summer evenings, but the trade-off comes in the short winter days. Recently, talking with a garden writer/speaker who lives in New Hampshire, I asked him about the winters. His response was revealing; he said that was his planning and resting time, and the seasonal cycle was one he enjoyed. Summer was a time of gardening, while spring and fall were speaking and traveling times. I find even our short winter days difficult, so I'd be a poor candidate for northern winters. We did have a great trip (in our winter) in southern Patagonia a few years ago -- it was light until past 10 pm -- a fabulous tonic! I'm taking a group of summer interns on a evening hike tomorrow -- we'll listen to the nocturnal symphony as the day turns to dusk and then dark. Lovely.