It fucks up the growing season.

I'd guess that the 20 below weeks we had wreaked more havoc on the plants outside than the 70 degree summer days did.

Moderate summer weather makes for a great gardening season
Barbara Brotman
July 28, 2014

This summer, a remarkable transformation has occurred:

I have become a fabulous gardener.

Or so I began to conclude, looking at my yard this year.

My relatively new shrubs and perennials, which by all rights by now I should have killed?

Thriving so wildly that some seem to want to break through the windows.

My tomatoes, the first I've ever grown in my front yard?

Massive plants, groaning under the weight of thick stems and a profusion of fruit.

I even seemed to have mastered my lawn, that annual source of torment.

Usually it looks good for two weeks in spring — just long enough to get my hopes up. Then it cackles — I swear I can hear it taunt, "Sucker!" — turns brown and breaks out in creeping Charlie.

But look at it now, green and thick in July, healthy and repelling weeds.

And look at me, finally the owner of a respectable lawn, if you don't count the part that thinks it's a field of violets.

I preened.

All those threats I made to my lawn to kill it and replace it with a patio must have beaten it into submission. It was ready to acknowledge my superiority, buckle down and behave.

As for the rest of my profusely growing garden?

A little cockiness crept in.

Maybe all this gardening stuff wasn't as hard or time-consuming as I had always thought. Look at those annuals, flowering wildly despite getting no attention and no watering. How easy was that?

And growing tomatoes was clearly a cinch. All you had to do was dig a few little plants into some soil and forget to water, and the next thing you knew they were so big they were toppling the tomato cages.

What a great activity gardening was! My lawn looked great, my shade garden plants looked so big they might be genetic mutants — and I had done pretty much nothing.

Could it be that I had somehow acquired garden magic?

Alas — it could not.

My magic was this summer's weather. Everyone's garden is green, because we've been essentially living in Seattle.

"It's just been really great weather," said Ron Wolford, urban horticultural educator at the University of Illinois Extension.

"We have gotten rain right when we need it. And the weather hasn't been extremely hot. So it's been really almost ideal conditions, especially for growing vegetables."

And especially tomatoes, for which this summer's weather has been pretty much perfect.

I'm not the only one with fabulous tomatoes. At the Smart Home garden at the Museum of Science and Industry, where Wolford supervises 40 master gardeners, "the tomatoes are just huge," he said.

At the museum's Member Open House last week, he said, people were in transports over their tomatoes.

"They were all saying 'Oh, my tomatoes, I've never seen them this big. ... I haven't had much luck in the past, but this is the best year we've had.'

"All our vegetables at the museum are just — I mean, huge. Bigger than I ever remember," he said. "We have native plants at the museum and oh, my god, they're just huge. Everything has just taken off."

As summers go, "I'd say it's probably one of the better ones," said Tim Johnson, director of horticulture at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Everything is lush and green, he said, and most plants are growing profusely.

He did rain a little on the best-summer parade. The coolness has the garden's tomatoes a little behind schedule, he said; the rain has brought a lot of mosquitoes. And since his lawn is still growing, he still has to mow it.

And tomatoes aren't the only plants growing. "The weeds are pretty hard to keep up with," he said.

Still, he praised this summer for providing another boon: The cooler weather makes it more comfortable to work outside.

But here's the thing. I don't want to work outside. That's been the beauty of this summer in the garden; I haven't had to do anything.

Oh, sure, I have to dig out the weeds, which at this point are more than 5 feet high with stems like tree trunks.

But there is a seriously skewed ratio of effort to results. And I have been enjoying it greatly.

This summer has been the lazy gardener's delight, delivering a maximum of garden beauty for a minimum of work. I can admire my lawn from my chaise longue.

Some people have spectacular gardens every year. Those are the genuine good gardeners. Me, I'm just mooching off the weather.

I didn't turn out to have any great magic. What I have is an unearned, good-looking garden, a temporarily green lawn and an unrealistic impression of the ease of growing tomatoes.

Sounds to me like a great season in the garden.

blbrotman@tribune.com

Corn crop is at least 3 weeks behind schedule out here.

Where are you at in IA Chas?

West of Des Moines corn is way ahead and predicted to be the best corn season ever recorded

My God. Weather men in Chicago are sad to reporter it. The anchor men and women (mostly the women) say when are we gonna warm up to the weather men? Len Kasper is saying it's "Chilly" on today's broadcast. He's kind of lamenting the weather.

WTF? Why?

When it's 90 degrees you air condition your house to 70 degrees for the love of God. I don't get the crying over 70 temperatures.

WHY IS THIS CONSIDERED BAD? Please somebody help me figure this out.

This weather sucks. It's like fucking October out there. If I wanted to live in San Francisco I'd move there.

My God. Weather men in Chicago are sad to reporter it. The anchor men and women (mostly the women) say when are we gonna warm up to the weather men? Len Kasper is saying it's "Chilly" on today's broadcast. He's kind of lamenting the weather.

WTF? Why?

When it's 90 degrees you air condition your house to 70 degrees for the love of God. I don't get the crying over 70 temperatures.

WHY IS THIS CONSIDERED BAD? Please somebody help me figure this out.

Corn crop is at least 3 weeks behind schedule out here.