If you’re a DC resident or gardener, I don’t need to tell you that the intense heat coupled with the complete lack of rain has been really rough lately. Last year, I barely needed to water anything. In fact, it rained so much in June and July 2009, that I wrote a post about one of my favorite DC things – summer thunderstorms.
Heh. Not this year, no sir! 2010 ain’t no punk@ss moderate year, content with soft breezes and gentle temperature fluctuations.
Nope, 2010 is the year that announced, “I’m gonna be different! I’m gonna dump more snow on the city than it’s seen in over 100 years. I’m gonna be really freakin’ cold and then I’m gonna be really freakin’ hot. Not hot like “Hey Koolaid!”-hot. Hot like fry-an-egg-on-the-nice-flat-hood-of-an-old-Jeep-Cherokee-Classic-hot. Now that’s HOT.”
In concrete terms, it means we’ve had one rainstorm in the most recent three week period. And we’d already hit 39° C/100° F-plus temperatures by late June. LATE JUNE. It ain’t even August yet.
Fortunately, my current addiction to triathlon has revealed a solution to being hot and sticky: getting more hot and sticky. After all, if I’m hot just sitting around the apartment, imagine how much cooler I will feel after baking for an hour or two in the hot sun on a bike/run training brick?
Now, if I were a tomato plant who sat in full sun all day, I might feel differently. I might feel like I was being just a tad whiny about the temperature indoors in the shade. I would probably counsel myself to be a little more grateful – at least, I had shade. Shade which I wouldn’t have if I were a tomato plant. Which, of course, I’m not. No, quite fortunately, I’m not a tomato plant who sits in full sun all day; rather I’m merely the morning and evening waterbearer.
Which brings me back to beans. On last night’s watering foray, I noticed little green bean sprouts poking up through the dirt. Hence this morning’s pictures. It’s the same Dragon’s Tongue bean I planted earlier in the year – if you look closely at the picture below, you can see tiny purple flecks in the veins of the baby leaves.
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