July Flame
July Flame
Fiery kind
Will always
Lead me through the night.
July Flame
Sweet summer peach
High up on in the branch
Just out of my reach
Can I call you mine?
—Laura Viers, “July Flame”
The height of midsummer, the heat of a July flame. Early mornings of hydration, both for the plants and for my body. An urgency in the air and a hush, after the Steller’s jay wakes us and coffee prepares me for a full day of all of my duties: mother, partner, gardener, musician…a woman trying to squeeze every last drop from these beautiful, complex days. When my kids were really young, I used to listen to a parenting podcast called The Longest Shortest Time, referring to the days of young parenthood that seemingly both last forever and fly by. That’s how July on the farm feels to me.
I started my farm and business at my childhood home in Poulsbo where my parents and grandmother live. An old pasture that once boarded horses and hosted organic vegetable farmers, I have spent the last six years transforming it, filling it with flowers, an occasional veggie, and lots of healthy weeds. Yes, I did indeed just write the phrase “healthy weeds”. Because the months and years boasting a very low amount of weeds were actually some of my least healthy days, from an emotional and mental perspective. An unpopular opinion, but I believe that a garden with weeds shows that you must be spending some of that weeding time making something else good. A delicious meal, a movie with your kids, an impromptu date or meetup with friends, a cool afternoon on the couch with a book, family time. We all get to choose where we put our time and I’ve found more and more as I get older that we truly put our energy into the things that matter to us. Makes sense, right? I have come to terms with the fact that the weeds often “win”. But sometimes, when the sun is beaming bright and true on a July day, the garden is going to take a backseat. And it’s me that’s winning as I choose balance and direct my energy that that which really matters in the moment: my kids, my husband, my music room and my ears filled with earnest attempts to try, again and again, to make something good.
In Poulsbo, the mess of weeds awaits me. While I had only planned to grow the peonies and a few crops intended for autumn there, I didn’t properly use silage tarps and other methods to control the weeds before the madness of May and June took over. While I embarked on a trip-of-a-lifetime to Japan and then supported my kids through the end of the school year, the weeds quietly gained traction, clawing their roots into my soil. They might be momentarily leading on the scoreboard, but this game is going into extra stoppage time and I will prevail, one way or another. This morning I was amazed to harvest an armful of statice and a few dahlia seedlings that over-wintered, along with shimmery, translucent branches of lunaria, aka money plant or honesty. I also saved a bundle of poppy heads, rattling in my hands like maracas, which came from seeds mailed by my husband’s 95-year-old grandma in Boise. I also checked on the heirloom mums thriving in the tunnel, with dreams of October blooms in just a few months.
It’s hard to believe the late light of the summer sky and long afternoons playing at the beach will soon be replaced by a cool low moon in the early autumn night, sweaters, scarves, and back-to-school. So let’s drink it in now, the successes of the flowers singing their songs, the successes of our weeds, real and imagined, which actually are proof of a life well-lived.