Wow, what a heat wave!

After all this rain I can tell it's summer finally... the sun is beginning to exert its dangerous forces on my parched little garden.  Two of my maples were burned, and one of them only had 3 leaves left.  I moved them to under the edge of the wisteria-covered porch where it's shadier and less windy, and have been a bit more attentive to watering.  I was pretty worried, but they're bouncing back.

The littlest maple made lots of buds right away!  It probably helped that I added some fish fertilizer.

The peas had browned quite a bit while I was away on vacation, and I was waiting to see if the hints of green meant life was still there... but they were fully dead within a week.  It's just too hot, and peas are a cold-weather plant.  Somehow this year I ended up with hardly any peas, maybe 30 out of 10 plants, but the vines were incredibly vigorous and had actually reached the top of the trellis, leaned over, and started to twine around the apple tree.  Last year with the same amount of plants in the same size pot, I was getting 5-8 peas a day for weeks, and the plants only got 2/3rds of the way up the same trellis.  The changed location is definitely making me change the way I've container-gardened in the past.

Though the peas are gone, the green beans are just getting started!

After living in the bay area for so many years, I'm not used to temperatures up in the 90's.  But it does feel good having more blatant extremes of weather, it makes me more aware of the seasons and time's progress.  And the heat of the season is made all the more enjoyable because we have air conditioning now!