There was a series of catchy TV commercials in the 1970s in which an actress portraying Mother Nature delights in the sweet taste and creamy texture of butter – what she thought was butter, that is.
A voice-over informs her the product is margarine, but so close to butter that even she couldn’t tell the difference.
“It’s NOT NICE to fool Mother Nature,” the woman in a tiara says, her smile turning to a scowl as she stands up to unleash a fury.
Lately it seems like Mother Nature is the one playing tricks.
It felt bizarre to be in shorts and T-shirt the first week of October. On Monday, the third of six straight days the mercury climbed above 80 degrees, the afternoon high was 85 at Reading Regional Airport, 15 degrees above normal.
Instead of cleaning up the vegetable patches and pulling overgrown tomato plants from the soil, I’m still picking ripe fruit.
The warm sunshine all week buried the memory of eight gloomy days between Sept. 22 and Sept. 30, when it rained all but two of them.
I’m a gardener, but my biggest and most important crop is grass. I have this rule that if I have to weed a patch of ground on which weeds win the war for dominance over and over again, it’s time to either turn it into lawn or hardscape.
But did you ever try growing fescue from fescue seed?
It’s futile to plant grass seed after early June. You need to put the patch on life support through the hot summer months only to discover you’ve wasted your time watering mostly weeds. Fall, with its lower temperatures but still abundant sunshine, is the best time to nurture grass seeds from germination to blades with deep enough roots to survive the winter.
But the window for planting is so narrow because the daytime is shorter and overnight low temperatures chill the ground, slowing germination.
With this in mind, I decided I was going to plant grass as early as the last week of August in an area where I finished removing invasive bushes last year.
This would allow the grass to germinate, I thought, and hopefully get a running start just as temperatures dropped into the 70s in September – the grass-growing season. My plan, in a sense, was to fool Mother Nature by using later-summer heat combined with timely watering to get a jump-start.
When Labor Day weekend rolled around, I finally had some time and dry weather to get in the dirt, literally.
I worked that Saturday, covering the Taste of Hamburg-er Festival, but I looked forward to getting a lot done in the yard the next two days. Then I saw the forecast. Sunday was the start of another heat wave, reminding us that summer wasn’t over.
On Labor Day, while the London broil marinated, I defiantly proceeded with my plan, despite oppressive humidity and mid-90s temperatures.
During one of my frequent excursions into our home to cool off and hydrate, my wife asked me if I was out of my mind.
“I’m beating Mother Nature at her own game,” I said.
Source: Berkshire mont