September has arrived, and with it comes fall weather and Indian summer and more fall weather. The trees are already turning, partly due to drought stress. A cool snap arrived, followed by record heat, followed by cool and windy weather. Such is autumn in New Hampshire.
Karen's folks have been and gone. They were here during weather that we found warm, but they found cool (compared to Arizona). We talked about drought, but they thought it was green (compared to Arizona). We enjoyed their visit and think that they enjoyed it, too.
Our garden consists of tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, basil, and pie pumpkins this year. We put almost no effort into it, and the drought stressed the plants, but the end result is a bumper crop! I think that this summer's heat waves made these particular plants happy, even as it made us miserable.
Our big thrill this summer has been butterflying. We signed up for the Vermont Butterfly Survey, a five year survey of Vermont to establish locations, abundances and other information about the butterflies in Vermont. I had (and still have) some misgivings, since the survey promotes collecting to some extent and considers records by non-collectors to be of lesser value. "We had to kill them to save them", etc. Anyway, we have staked out a few sites across the river from us and gone to them repeatedly to look at bugs. We've found quite a few. I take pictures of them when I can. You can see some of the pictures by going to my butterfly lifelist page and clicking on any species name that has been made into a link.
The survey has also prompted us to buy a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit so that we can record exactly where we see each bug. It also ought to be useful when bushwhacking by snowshoe in the winter, since you can use it to point you back to your starting point.
I've gotta go store up some more acorns for winter. Hope all is well with you!
Peace,
Terry
9/12/02