The Miseries of July in the Garden

Every single year the month of July puts my love of gardening to the test. It's really quite frustrating. I begin the gardening year, like everyone else, with wide-eyed, earnest reading of the February catalogs and by planning The Next Great Garden. I go forth in early March to plant the spring vegetables. In April and May I plant the summer vegetables and fill in the landscape with annual and perennial flowers. I enjoy all this immensely, of course, floating along in my stylish gardening hat and gloves; my pale, Scots-Irish complexion well hidden under long pants and shirt.  Sure, there are some hot days, but mostly there are just wonderful, spring-like, temperate days. I even mow the grass at 3:00 in the afternoon without giving it a second thought and sometimes after that I actually linger around people and they aren't offended.  

Then July arrives and no more cool, spring breezes. No more being able to go out at 1:00 in the afternoon to work a bit. July is the month that the weeds have their victory. The yard along the side of the house that no one sees has poke sallet growing to almost 3 feet tall and I have given up my fight with it. My tidy mint garden near the bird feeder has more poison ivy than mint. The vegetables I planted so carefully and with such anticipation are all producing! The tomatoes are red and the cucumbers are a foot long! If it just wasn't so hot. I would go outside and pick them, but I sure hate to leave the air conditioning. So, you know what happens, right? They hang there and get a little too ripe and the insects all somehow know this and converge on them to eat them and vector viruses. Next thing I know, I have garden diseases.  

And I may as well forget about looking fashionably gardener-like or even just basically presentable in July. No matter how garden artsy the outfit or cute the hat, in July my gardening clothes feel like sweaty, industrial weight canvas that would be better suited to the Canadian north. So, I exchange my long pants for shorts and reveal my very un-tanned legs and I sweat profusely in whatever cool, cotton shirt I can find. As for hats, nothing works; not the lightweight tennis visor hats, not the special space-age running hats, not the wide-brimmed straw hats. No matter what I put on my head in July, it feels like I am wrapping my head in thick wool. And gloves? They are usually glued to my hands by the time I'm through gardening because I have sweated in them so much. July has a way of keeping it real by revealing just how sweaty, grimy, and gross I really can be. It's ironic that the only other place I would dare to wear a hat and gloves would be to a very formal event like the Kentucky Derby or to dine with the Queen of England. And yet, there I am in July with the essential hat and gloves on, looking most unpresentable.  

I guess gardening pretentiousness belongs at cocktail parties on those rare, cool summer evenings at gardens where someone else has done all the work. Not that I would turn down a cocktail on a cool evening at a garden party where someone else has done all the work. Right now, at 4:00 in the afternoon on this hot, humid July 4th day, that would work for me.