The News from Kenabeek

Hot, hot, hot, even humid. Yesterday I picked my first quart of berries, all from the rocky areas close to the house. Lots more on the bushes in all colours from waxy white through various pinks to bluish purple to the real, ripe blue. What with jam and muffins and pies and all, I hope to put about 15 quarts in the freezer, and have enough sugar plums and pin cherries to make a batch of jelly each (jelly, because the seeds inside are big enough to be annoying).

Today we looked out the back window and there was a young doe, only a few yards from the house. She stayed there for 10 or 15 minutes, so I had time to grab my camera and take a few pictures of her. She couldn’t see us, because we were peering through the venetian blinds, but obviously felt us watching her, or heard us, because she was quite watchful the whole time. What good luck that one of us happened to look out the window at the right time! Early in our stay here, we had a similar experience with a cow moose and her calf, grazing in back of the house … We are surrounded by bush, and the secret is to look out the window at the right moment; judging from tracks in the winter, we actually see our four-footed neighbours less than half the time they visit.

I apparently have at least four readers, and one of them wondered about how usual it was for a bear (like the one we saw a few posts back) to have three cubs. I thought it was unusual, but I checked bears in our book, and apparently triplets are quite usual for black bears – one to five cubs, the book says. Imagine being responsible for feeding five growing bear cubs, with hibernation again just around the corner!

We are well into the August flowers now – the fireweed is in bloom, and even the goldenrod is budding! I wonder if they will all last longer, or if we’ll have no flowers at the end of the summer because they’ll have finished their cycles. Lots of yellow in the fallow fields and roadsides, trefoil still hanging in there, along with several other, bigger yellow plants I haven’t identified yet. Also something I call “silverrod”, because it looks just like goldenrod, but with white blossoms instead of yellow. White yarrow is all over the place, too, oddly luminous in the twilight. There are still some daisies, and clumps of blue-purple vetch, and rosy-brown patches where the wild grasses are going to seed.

In the garden, the delphinium and day lilies are in full bloom, and the poppies are just starting.