Red Sun in the West

California is still on fire, and we're still in the smoke. When I got back from donating blood this evening, a couple of hours before sunset, a blood-red sun was just barely visible to the west, and it was already dark enough that the chickens were going in to roost. July is usually our hottest month, and today was the first, of forecasted many, over 100 degrees . Summer has arrived, with a vengeance (thank goodness our nights still cool down to the low-50's).

I was late getting a lot of my vegetable garden planted this year, and then some of my corn had a poor germination rate. So, a few days ago I tried sprouting some corn seeds. Just like growing salad sprouts, I soaked the seed for an afternoon in a little bowl. I then drained the water out, covered the seeds with a damp towel, and kept re-wetting it morning and evening for two days. Then, I took the just-sprouted seeds and poked them into the blank spots in the corn patch, with the little root pointing down. This evening, most of them already have little green shoots above the soil. I'm nowhere near my grandpa's old saying about sweet corn, "knee-high by the Fourth of July", but I'm still hoping for lots of fresh sweet corn later this summer.