Summer continues apace—well, no, it doesn’t: It’s been unusual lately, very unusual in many ways. The Instagram photo above is actually part of what’s normal, and what’s not.
A friend told me on Facebook that birds go after tomatoes for water. However, we’d had torrential rains on Sunday, so bad it cancelled this year’s Big Gay Out, for the first time in 30 years. It turns out that this was just a symptom of something much bigger: Only 43 days in to the year, and Auckland has already had more than one-third of the normal annual rainfall. This can’t be good.
Yesterday was an absolutely gorgeous day—stunning, even. That evening we picked the tomatoes so I could sprinkle tomato dust on the plants to deal with pests, after all that rain on the weekend. I woke up in the middle of the night because of torrential rain outside. I knew it was washing off all the dust I’d so carefully sprinkled. It rained most of today, too.
Yesterday it hit 28 degrees (82.4F) with 99% humidity. It was rather unpleasant. Today, the temperature was cooler—around 23 (73.4F)—but with humidity every bit as high. And this was as I was starting my new project, sorting the stuff in the garage and reorganising it. It didn’t go well.
Despite all that, the birds’ behaviour was more or less normal—it’s just everything else that wasn’t. Well, actually, this is apparently the new normal.
Still, we’ve harvested a lot of tomatoes already, with more to ripen, and that’s been really nice. Nothing quite like fresh tomatoes, especially when they’re “free”.
Pity about the weather, though.
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