I am a lifelong consumer of national news. One thing that always holds my interest is weather events around the globe.

Lately I’ve been following the story out of California about the disastrous wildfire. A man was arrested as it was discovered he pushed his burning vehicle over a cliff igniting that fire.

I continue to be one of the baffled. Was he malicious or just plain stupid? I ask that question often in my daily life. I fall into the stupid category many times in my garden habits.

I love making dilly beans every year. I can many quarts to enjoy all winter. They are a simple water-bath canner project.

This year I timed my bean/dill planting poorly. Now I have beans and pathetic dill. On Sunday I went on the hunt. Several of the local farmstands did not have any.

My friend Marie was able to locate a few usable heads in her garden. I made a few quarts for the fridge.

I like to refresh everyone’s memory yearly: 3 cups water, 1 cup apple cider vinegar, 2 tablespoon salt, some cloves of garlic. Boil these ingredients and pour over raw beans and dill.

I took my own advice from last week’s column and replanted carrots, beets, cucumbers, green beans and sugar snap peas. The peas are not crazy about the heat in August, but they will produce by the end of September. Oddly, they can survive a freeze in the early spring but will be killed during a fall frost when they are fully grown.

Also, in last week’s column I mentioned the abundance of Queen Anne’s Lace everywhere. Fun fact: when the cut flowers are placed in food coloring, they will absorb the color very quickly. I used an entire small bottle of blue with a tiny amount of water in Sunday morning and by evening the flowers were already blue. Small children love this project. Good luck with the cleanup.

Last fall, I purchased some large Agapanthus for a customer. The pots went right into ornamental urns (not transplanted). I brought them into an unheated greenhouse in the fall. This house had the heavy white covering, not the six-mil plastic.

I never watered them or even checked on them and yet here they are happily blooming once again. Will wonders ever cease?

My favorite daylily is the cultivar Hyperion. It is very tall, lemon-yellow and fragrant. It’s great in the back of a bed as it stands above all the other varieties. Hopefully one gives it a deer-free home. They are such jerks. They wait until the bud is just about to bloom.

I think those pods are an ingredient in hot and sour soup found in Chinese restaurants. Do not trust me, I may have made that up.

I also love the native lily called Turk’s Cap or American Tigerlily. I have a few which I never planted. They are a bright orange and look great in a patch of yucca along a roadway. In the fall they produce a black seed which can be tossed here and there for next year.

In July of 1964, LBJ signed into law the Civil Rights Act which prevented racial discrimination in employment and public places. I had just graduated from high school and remembered it as if yesterday. Sadly, I came from an area that did not quite agree (still doesn’t). I found it to be life-changing just like the JFK assassination in November of the previous year.

President Biden is speaking at a commemoration of that event next week. You know I’ll be watching.