Purple prickly pear (Opuntia macrocentra)
Here’s one plant well suited to this summer’s extreme weather. You won’t see a prickly pear give up the ghost easily, even one in a container that got watered maybe three times all summer.
One of the Austin American-Statesman‘s front-page stories today reveals that:
“August 2006 will go down as the hottest August in Austin since, well, ever. The average high for the month at Camp Mabry [within walking distance of my house] was 100.7, thanks to 24 days of 100-degree-or-higher readings. The mercury hit 104 three times. The nights weren’t much better, and that helped drive the overall average temperature for the month to 88.5 degrees, about 4 degrees above normal. . . . [You’d] have to go back more than a century to find a month much hotter than August 2006.”
Tell me something I don’t already know. My garden sure shows it, and once-green highway medians and greenbelts are toasted brown this year. It being Texas, most people just sweated it out like normal. At the end of the month, Austin held its 16th annual Hot Sauce Festival, the heat in the air matching the heat on the tongue. It’s a macho thing. Or maybe a nacho thing. No, I wasn’t man enough. I prefer the Barton Springs Pool approach to summer. That plus good ole A/C. There were no heat-related deaths last month, according to the paper, so everyone else had the sense to stay inside or stay wet too.
Anyway, now that August is behind us, we gardeners can get back to doing what we love. OK, so we love griping about the heat, but I meant digging, moving things around, dividing, pruning, trying something new. Just a few short weeks and we’ll be basking in our second “spring,” when gardens come back to life.
So long, August. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.