Weather extremes have been the default this year. From wet, chilly conditions with little sunshine to heat waves and drought… extremes have become the new normal. And yet, humanity is not getting their collective act together because individuals benefit from the social and climate crises. So, while I prune the tomatoes, let me talk about weather extremes in the garden and normalizing political extremes everywhere. After a modern-day hippie rant about politics and climate change, I show you how much I’ve gotten done.

Today is a really really hot day but since there’s a thunderstorm coming I’ve decided to go to the garden anyway and get some things done. We’re gonna have to move the umbrella a lot because it is so hot. It’s about 30 degrees I think that’s about 90 Fahrenheit so it’s very hot in the shade and there’s a lot of open area in my garden so we’re gonna have to move the umbrella from task to task and drink a lot of water which is the first thing I’m gonna deal with.

I set up the pump to get more water from the neighbor and filled Pepper’s bowl and my bottle with water. I keep a container with drinking water in the garden house for this.

I’d soon move these compost bins to turn them, so I filled up the black bins and got the grass clippings for mulch. Below the grass, a beautiful layer of compost is starting to form. In spring, we’ll have compost to work with. My neighbor had to give up his animals, so I’ll also add a lot of bedding to these piles soon.

I was sweating from just a few minutes in the open sun, so I set up the umbrella for some work in the shade. It’s in bad shape but functional, so we use it.

The tomatoes were recovering well from the blight earlier this summer. I kept them pruned out of paranoia.

We’d gone from way too much water for almost two years to a few weeks of drought conditions. Blight was unlikely now. But I was sure the wet would return, so I played it safe. I wasn’t yet aware that I’d have to deal with sun damage next. Downsides to every approach, I guess.

Extremes are the new normal. Have you had any normal summer days this year?

Scan the news and you’ve got flooding, mud slides, forest fires, toxic blooms in lakes and rivers, and so on. On average, Germany has been too warm this summer. But it’s worse than that if you look at more than the average.

Back in April, the cherry tree had been covered in flowers. Then, the frosts returned, and we lost them all. No cherries this year.

With few to no normal, average, nice summer days, the average is even more scary. Days were either too cold or too hot, rarely ever in the middle ranges.

Months and months of humidity and precipitation flipped over to dry, scorching conditions. The story repeats in many parts of the world. Bouncing from one extreme to the other is exhausting.

All life on Earth struggles to adapt. Here, nights and mornings are often chilly now with scorching afternoons. Our bodies can’t get used to temperatures with these ranges.

While the media is still sticking to the narrative that the climate crisis is a thing of the future, we are already in the middle of it. The climate crisis is here–and it’s getting worse.

And the worst part? A tiny portion of people benefits from exploiting the planet and others. Almost everyone would be better off if we stopped exploiting the planet, found our place in the food web, and switched to we-we-we instead of me-me-me.

But the richest people on this planet benefit from the social and climate crises, from war, from suffering. They have divided us, managed to make us fight each other. Everyone talks about what the poor cost us. The rich cost us so much more.

Governments keep making exceptions for large coorporations, giving them tax exemptions or other benefits. The richest individuals often pay the fewest taxes in relation to their worth. All of us are poor compared to them. We shouldn’t fight each other.

Racism, misogyny, any variation of hating the so-called other, they all make us fight each other. I’m about to get a bit political, so please skip to the next chapter if you don’t want to hear it.

Fascist governments and individuals are taking over everywhere. Individual rights keep getting curtailed. The political situation in Germany and the US is scary. It’s little better in most other places. Moderate parties normalize racist, sexist, and other-phobic ideals, playing into the hands of the right.

Our rights are at risk. While claiming to fight for our children and safety, they take away our freedom. It is a creeping change. That’s the dangerous part. A little more surveillance, a bit more power to the police, a few more banned books… all seems innocent and justified if you swallow the narrative.

I know there are exceptions. Some countries have elected socialist governments this year. But many haven’t.

I read a quote recently that stuck: “fascinate the fools, muzzle the intelligent.” Both of this is happening. In Germany, some states have a third of their population supporting a fascist party. This scares me.

So, the next time you are putting someone in a box, the next time you us-versus-them, pause to think. Are they really that different from you? Or are your internalized ideals messing with you? Let’s do better. Let’s work together. Let’s choose love over hate. Even if it is hard. Especially then.

Okay, modern-day hippie rant over. Let’s return to the garden.

Some of the teepee beans and Brunhilde beans were ready to harvest, so I collected them after the tomato pruning. Both varieties look almost the same, except that the teepee beans are a lot smaller. And after a quick weed of the sunflower bed, my alarm rang to tell me it was 5 pm.

Yeah, we’ve gotten a lot done again. I’m not quite done with the tomato bed. I’m almost done, but it’s 5 p.m. And I promised myself I’d go hard with blackberries at 5 p.m. So I guess we’re doing that.

There are definitely fewer blackberries now and there were a week or two ago, but there’s still plenty and we harvested quite a few.

So now let me quickly show you what I did today and then I’m gonna head home. Let’s start with the tomatoes. I mulched everything.

I used the straw here because I wanted the best moisture conditions. So straw, the thicker one is really good at keeping moisture in the soil, but keeping it away from the plants that are higher up. So I used straw here. And what I did is I also trimmed them back a lot more.

You’ll see that there are essentially no suckers now and anything that was yellow or brown went away. And I did that with all of these tomatoes.

So if we have a look down here, you’ll see that it’s a lot more open now that it’s way more important. There are fruit everywhere. I have saved my tomatoes. My tomatoes survived blight.

It is gonna rain this week. We’re gonna get three days of rainy, wet weather and thunderstorms, but I think we’re fine. It’s just three days. And then we’re gonna go back to drier conditions. At least that’s the current forecast.

Yeah, also, have a look. There, down here. Look. There’s a really big pumpkin down there. Let me remove the Ackerschachtelhalm. Horsetail everywhere. And also there’s a second one up here and a third one back there and a fourth one up at the very top. It’s so cool.

And as you can see, I’ve moved all the tomatoes on top of the straw. So even if the tomatoes were on the ground, like some of the tomatoes are grown down the ground, I put all of them up onto the straw. So same story over here. They hopefully won’t get as wet.

And that’s most of what I did today. I also did the Zuckertraube, but they did a lot less thorough job there because I was running out of time.

So this one’s not as done, but this one is also producing fruit for me. So yeah, the tomatoes are recovering, and I think they will survive.

The pump had finished filling the barrel, so I cleaned up, and headed home. It was getting late, and my stomach was calling for dinner.

So long, and thanks for being here!