I’m one of the baffled ones. Last Friday’s rain was lovely and seemingly significant. Here it is Monday and I’ve been handling hoses. What gives?

My vegetable garden is completely beyond my control. It’s bad when I do not have the time and/or energy to pick food.

I have yet to plant bush beans although the Fortex pole beans are just beginning to produce. I ate a few in the field.

The good news about bush beans, cucumbers and zucchini is that there still is time. They take a mere 50 or so days. Often when planted late, the Mexican bean beetle does not find them quickly.

I took a chance and planted some Country Gentleman corn on Sunday. It takes 90 days but hope springs eternal. Why I bother is beyond me. Raccoons find it the exact day it ripens.

Honestly, don’t do as I do. I neglected to plant winter squash and pumpkin in a timely fashion. I threw entire seed packets into a tiny area. When they emerged (dozens of them), I ripped them apart, sliced a hole in some weed mat and transplanted each one. About half have lived. The weed mat was so hot mid-day that the other half completely fried. What, I wonder, was I imagining?

Sometime in February I planted some old wrinkled potatoes in a big pot in my greenhouse. I hauled it outside sometime in April and they promptly froze. The other day I needed the pot, emptied it and found enough new potatoes to feed the family for two days. Nature is grand!

The field before Sweetened Water Farm on the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road is awash with butterfly weed. Then, as luck would have it, the very next day I saw my first monarch. It was fluttering around the milkweed I purposefully left in a bed of peppers.

A great read about monarchs is Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver, f.y.i. I leave yarrow in the gardens. Some folks weed it out as it does behave in a weedy fashion. It fills in nicely around other more colorful plants. It seems to vary in shades of white, pink, rose and apricot. Different, though, is the fern leaf variety, Moonshine. I planted it from seed. It does not seem to spread. Its bright yellow flower and strong scent is a real plus in the perennial beds or a meadow.

Last week I went on about Ivanka Trump being even worse than Dad. Sorry, but there is yet another worst, Mike Pence! I’m completely offended by his so-called “Christianity.” His blank stare at the horrible detention facility in McCallum, Tex., last week said it all. He nods approvingly at everything DJT lies about. His oblivious, pious, better-than-thou attitude is renowned. How ‘bout the “I’m never alone with a woman who is not my wife?” What’s that say? He doesn’t trust himself or thinks women are after him? Ewwww!

I’m an aging white woman who was raised in an Evangelical church in Appalachia. I must have been dropped from Mars because I could not be further from the white Evangelical base of the present Republican party.

I cannot picture Jesus suggesting children should be put in cages or black congresswomen should “go back” to the “crime-infested countries from which they came.”

Wonder if Mike Pence actually read Matthew 25:31-46!