July 24-30, 2017

Love all Creation. Love every leaf, and every ray of light. Love the plants. Love the animals. If you love everything, you will perceive the Divine Mystery in all things. Once you perceive it, you will comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all embracing love.

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Almanac horoscope

Moon time: The Blackberry Moon, new on July 23, waxes through its first quarter this week, entering its second phase at 10:23 a.m. on July 30. Rising in the morning and setting late in the evening, this moon passes overhead during the early afternoon.

Sun time: This week the sun reaches a declination of 18 degrees, marking a fourth of the way to autumn equinox.

Planet time: Venus remains the bright morning star in the east at dawn. Jupiter is the evening star in the far west after sundown.

Star time: An hour or two before sunrise, walk out and look to the east. Orion will be rising in the same position he will be in the night of Christmas Eve. The Pleiades and Taurus will be almost overhead. Cygnus, the summer swan of August evenings, will be setting in the northwest.

Shooting star time: The Southern Delta Aquarid meteors and the Perseid meteors brighten the east after midnight during the first half of August. The first week of the month provides the darkest sky for shooting star observation.

Weather time

After the July 24 cool front moves east, the Dog Days usually return for August, weakened only a little by the arrival of the August 4 high-pressure system. Although the daily possibility of highs in the 80s and 90s remains near July levels, cool days do occur 15-25 percent of the years, and afternoons only in the 60s are recorded in the northern tier of states.

Zeitgebers: By the end of the month, ragweed blooms, along with jumpseed and the great blue lobelia and boneset. Osage fruits, full size, drop to the ground. Lizard’s tail and wood nettle go to seed along the riverbanks.

Wild grapes ripen and geese become restless The first Judas maple starts to turn orange, and late-summer fogs appear at dawn. Fireflies disappear from the summer evenings, honeysuckle berries ripen and blackberries are ready to pick for wine and pie.

When green acorns fall to the sweet rocket growing back for next year’s flowers, then black walnut trees will have lost about a third of their leaves and violet Joe Pye weed flowers become gray like the thistledown. Now, the yellowing locust and buckeye leaves, and the brown garlic mustard give a sense of fall to the woods. Shiny spicebush, boxwood, greenbrier and poison ivy berries have formed.

Honewort and wood nettle, mallow and tall meadow rue go to seed. Early cottonwoods are weathering. Patches of yellow appear on the weaker ash trees. Pods of the touch-me-not burst at the slightest movement. Dogbane pods swing in the wind.

Field and garden time Peaches, processing tomatoes and peppers are almost all picked, and the fruit of the bittersweet ripens orange. When hickory nuts and black walnuts drop into the undergrowth, then dig your potatoes and make corrective lime and fertilizer applications for August and September seeding.

Consider planting tomatoes for autumn and winter greenhouse fruit. As conditions permit, seed fall pastures and late summer greens, beans and peas. Put out cabbage, kale and collard sets.

Prepare soil for autumn wheat planting. Autumn turnip planting often begins this week, guided by the first purple blossoms of tall ironweed and the peak of melon harvest time. Summer apple and blueberry seasons wind down. Farmers prepare for August seeding of alfalfa, smooth brome grass, orchard grass, tall fescue, red clover and timothy.

Marketing time: Consider marketing your lamb and chevon for cookouts celebrating Jamaican Independence Day (August 7) and Ecuadorian Independence Day (August 10).

Mind and body time

Ragweed season has opened throughout the South, and it is due to begin in the lower Midwest this week. Consequently, the Almanac horoscope suggests caution when taking tests for employment or school placement.

Recent studies have shown that test scores fall as pollen counts rise. Consider postponing college entrance examinations as well as federal or state service exams until late autumn or early winter.

Creature time (for fishing, hunting, feeding, bird-watching): The dark moon overhead in the middle of the day favors lunchtime fishing throughout the week.

As August approaches, stay out until suppertime. Cool fronts around July 28 and August 4 are expected to push the barometric pressure down before they pass over your boat; fish should bite a little more when as that pressure dips.  Now migration time intensifies for birds. The earliest blue-winged teal, meadowlarks, wood ducks, Baltimore orioles and purple martins start to disappear south.

Almanac classics

A Little Bird Told Me

By Susan Perkins

Hardtimes Farm, Ky.

While I was hanging clothes on the line, a black-capped chickadee flew down and landed just a few feet from where I was working. It jumped up and down, twittered and carried on like I was doing something wrong. I had never had a wild bird come this close before, so I knew a baby bird must be close to where I was working.

I started looking for the baby. Sure enough, a baby had fledged from the nest and ended up on the ground. But the baby was nowhere near where I was working. Something else was wrong. I looked around and noticed a piece of tin lying up under some scrub brush. I knew there had to be a snake hiding  there, and it was after the baby chickadee. It may have already got some of the fledging babies, as I only saw one. I picked up the tin and jumped back. Just as I suspected, there was a 4-foot black snake under the tin. One of my dogs jumped in and made quick work of him. I put the baby bird up in a tree and Mom and Dad continued feeding it until it finally flew away. This has never happened again. Guess there’s something to the saying, “A little bird told me so.”