Welcome to Whitey's World

And now, after scarcely a drop of rain over the past month, here comes summer. Today, the temperature is in the mid-90s Fahrenheit, with similar temperatures forecast for the next two days. This is the season when almost everyone else around here goes outside smiling and celebrating the return of summer . . . and I retreat to the cool interior of my house, or to a shady spot somewhere in the West Cascades, to tough it out until cooler weather returns in (maybe!) October.

And so it goes. As a few of us say, “I didn’t sign up for this,” living as I do in the onetime comfortable-in-summer Willamette Valley, but “this” is what summer here has now become over a period of only a few decades: longer, hotter, and drier. Native plants and animals are just going to have to figure this out. But most of the human beings I see simply turn up the air-conditioning in their ludicrously oversized motorized vehicles (gas-guzzling or electricity-guzzling) and carry on.

On a lighter note, it’s strawberry season. (“What? Not strawberry shortcake for dessert AGAIN tonight? When can we have something different for dessert?”) It lasts just a couple of weeks, so eventually, we SHALL have something different for dessert. In the meantime, oh-boy. A neighbor was comparing with me just today some strawberries he’d purchased at a local upscale grocery—berries that had both the texture and taste of a piece of wood. Sigh. So I shared with him one of my just-picked, sun-warmed berries from the garden, and he was appropriately “transported” to a place much closer to Paradise than he had been. (Big smile from the strawberry grower!)

The only vegetables yet to be planted out in my summer garden are my beloved “English” cucumbers—one of which reached 17 inches in length a couple summers ago, readers may recall. But they’ve germinated in their protective pots and I’m just waiting until they’re big enough to overwhelm the snails, which would otherwise devour tiny cucumber seedlings.

The first plantings of both broccoli and cauliflower were a great success, and successive plantings of lettuce have been continually producing since sometime in late March. There are plenty of green tomatoes getting bigger by the day against the south wall of the house, and I’ll surely have my first ripe ones before July 4th—then it’s non-stop until October and even November. And that’s just the short garden report.

Meanwhile, in the West Cascades, tiger lilies (orange with black spots, but without fragrance) are in bloom at an elevation of 1500-2000 feet and soon Cascade lilies (white and fragrant!) will be out, as well. This past Thursday, I also saw an abundance of the lovely circumboreal species called twinflower (Linnaea borealis) that I first met in the forests of northern Sweden in 1974!

And Life goes on.

(This page updated 13 June 2026.)