August 3rd DRY WELL
Two things of note today: One, our first tomato ripened and it was delicious. More are on the way soon. Two, the well went dry. I'm not surprised. It's been an exceptionally dry summer so far, and the more surprising thing is that it hadn't gone dry sooner. Even so it's not really a major problem; just a minor inconvenience. We still get our drinking water from the spring two miles out of town, and for wash and garden water we can haul buckets up from the creek or dip into the frog pond back behind the garden.

As a matter of fact, I needed to go down to the creek again today anyway as I wanted to collect more mint. There was plenty of it growing along the bank, some with tiny white flowers, some with pale blue flowers, and some with larger purple flowers. All had the square stems and opposite leaves, but the leaves of the purple flowered species were noticeably less aromatic when I crushed some in between my fingers, so I didn't pick any of those. Instead I cut maybe a dozen stalks each of the other two species. Hopefully this will cause them to bush out and grow twice as much so that I can come back later in the season to collect more. The cut stalks I hung in bunches from the rafters to dry.

August 7th LADY'S THUMB
The garden is becoming as overgrown as a bramble patch, so today I spent the day weeding. This inevitably turned into a drawing/painting project. Today I chose Lady's thumb for a specimen.

Lady's thumb is a smartweed, the generic name for a handful of plants of the buckwheat family all having branching semi-succulent stems with short spikes of tightly packed flowers at the tips of the the branches and in the leaf axils. The flowers are pink or white and open ever so slightly, if at all, making it impossible to count the various parts. Suffice it to say a short spike of densely packed bud-like flowers.

What makes Lady's thumb (Polygonum persicaria) unique among the smartweeds is the dark spot on the leaf. This vaguely heart-shaped spot is said to be the thumb print of a lady of legend, but apparently no one remembers the lady or the legend. Blackheart is another name for this plant. It grows to a height of perhaps two feet and is common in neglected gardens.

Other smartweeds include water smartweed (P. amphibium) with a shorter, pinker, stubbier flower spike found in and around ponds, and pale or pink smartweed (P. lapathifolium), a much larger plant with drooping flower clusters to four inches long. I also found a fourth smartweed with small white flower clusters down along the creekbank. It had arrow-shaped leaves and I quite easily identified it as arrow-leaved smartweed or arrow-leaved tearthumb (P. sagittatum). It has sharp tiny recurved bristles along its stem.

Japanese knotweed (P. cuspidatum), an invasive relative, is huge in comparison. Growing in dense thickets to a height of up to eight feet, it looks like bamboo. The hollow stems are often an inch in diameter when full-grown, but the tender young shoots under a foot tall are purported to be a favorite spring delicacy. They are easy to find by locating last year's monster canes.