TRANSITION SEASON

The transition from Summer to Fall is in full swing. Even the visiting birds are switching. I saw a flock of Canadian Geese. It seemed like they were heading north. Maybe its just been too hot here. This summer has been strange with its high humidity here in Southern California. All over the world, the summer weather has been intense. Big heat in Europe, heavy rainstorms flooding the midwest to the east coast in the US, droughts happening where there aren’t usually droughts.

You see the evidence of weather change at the farmers market. The greens like Swiss Chard, lettuce, chicories that are usually abundant are missing or reduce to maybe one farm. The cucumbers came out in June and seemed to disappear in July and August. Corn and tomatoes came in early, but the heat is causing some plants to fizzle out. The string beans at the market were in terrible shape; almost compost already. Stone crops were hit with extremely high heat in the summer. Crops came in one to two months early if at all. Some trees didn’t set fruit due to the high temperatures throughout California this February and March. I have never seen that before to this degree. I’ve written a lot about this in my previous posts from February until now. It is scary to think that we won’t be able to grow stone fruit in California any more, or it will become very limited. Maybe higher mountain ranges will be able to grow things that were not possible before. Farmers who grow stone crops are quitting and selling their land. It is really hard to see. Who is going to grow our food? It can’t all be houses and industrial buildings. You see this too in the wine industry. Champagne is being grown successfully in England now because of the more temperate climate. I also had a hard time keeping even the dahlias growing in the high humid heat of this summer. The completely died off and the leaves turned brown in July.

At the beach, there are more sharks and some you don’t see frequently like hammerheads are appearing in the warm ocean. The water temperature has been in the low 70’s, which is rare for us in California. The juvenile white sharks, which make their home off the coast of Carpinteria, are not leaving. They would normally move out to the Channel Island off the coast. Sometimes I think they have gotten very comfortable with the humans to the point of even wanting to surf. No stories of shark bites yet. There are plenty of stingrays for them to eat, but the larger sharks need bigger food like seals or dolphins, although dolphins are very fast and usually avoid that fate.

Some things have stayed the same, like how the light changes in mid-August through October. The lighting in fall is so beautiful. It turns a soft golden color. I miss the loss of long sunlight days, but I do like the light especially of October.

We are all wondering what the El Nino will bring for us this fall and winter. Time will tell. Meanwhile, we will hope for a cooler winter with rains to bring relief to the farmers, but not devastating floods. Just slow steady rains.