Signs of summer in the outdoors

Who enjoys the sauna-like conditions that have prevailed for most of the last month?

Raise your hands, mosquitoes. You, too, fungus, weeds, water grass and the plant that grows Iowa — corn.

As much as I have enjoyed all the “Hot enough for you?” greetings and the incongruity of running wipers on a sunny day to clear the water condensing on my air conditioning-cooled windshield, you won’t see me raising my hand.

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July, never my favorite month, has sunk this year to least-favored status with too much heat and rain, unbearable humidity and rogue wind blasts.

I have not caught a photo-worthy fish since June 15 and have hardly tried. Every time the interior rivers fall to near-fishable levels, another widespread heavy rain renders them high, muddy and swift.

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Much of the time that should have been consumed by fishing has been allocated to mowing the dense, rapidly growing, aptly named water grass — a warm-season, flat-bladed weed (aka crab grass) that takes over lawns in the hottest months and has to be mowed wet because it never dries.

You can “fix” water grass by spraying your lawn with certain herbicides. I don’t because 2,4-D smells like death to me. I would rather complain about water grass than to poison insect habitat and the clippings — all of which go on my garden as mulch — that surround food I intend to eat.

In the prevalent damp, fungus-friendly environment many lawns have been blessed with full or partial fairy rings — a naturally occurring ring or arc of large white mushrooms whose caps are embossed with other-worldly designs.

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Lawn care companies define them as a disease, which they would be happy to cure for a price. To a hammer, everything really does look like a nail.

Corn plants could hardly have been happier than they were in July, their towering stalks bearing nitrogen-supercharged leaves of a dark, rich glistening green unmatched by anything in nature. Not to mention one good ear and one great ear, which (multiplied by the 445 billion corn stalks in Iowa) are likely to yield a record crop.

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Corn sweat and its effect on the muggy meter drew considerable attention last month. Agronomists say an acre of maturing corn releases from 3,000 to 4,000 gallons of water per day, significantly increasing humidity levels.

I don’t begrudge the corn its sweating when I myself soak a shirt every time I stroll through water grass behind my self-propelled lawn mower.

Rain makes grain, which is great if your watching the maturation of likely record corn and soybean crops. Not so much if your 68 tomato plants, subjected to round-the-clock dampness, are beset with early onset blight and the borings of a record crop of tomato horn worms.

Just as I was getting reconciled to blight and horn worms the weather got worse. It’s hard to wake me in the middle of the night when I lie down after a few hours of physical exertion with a semi-clean conscience and my hearing aids on the charger. But overnight rogue storms did it two nights in a row last week.

Winds gusting to 78 mph flattened my sturdily caged plants, breaking off branches and scattering green tomatoes around the mud-smeared vines. On Monday afternoon I cleaned up the mess, raised the cages and secured them to fence posts driven into the mud. A similar storm Monday night again smashed them into the mud, and they await my attention on Tuesday as I write this column.

This experience helps me identify — at least a little bit — with farmers whose crops are damaged or destroyed by hail, wind, drought and floods. I say “a little bit” because my loss is not financial, and with 68 bedraggled plants I will still have more tomatoes than I can use — just not so many to give away.

My growing tomatoes is comparable to farmers’ growing corn in the sense that we like to do it and are pretty good at it, and we share the same frustration and disappointment when capricious weather cancels our best efforts.