2022 had been one of the hottest and driest summers every for East Central Florida until the last week of August. Nine or more inches of rain fell between August 22 and 30. So what can survive this onslaught of arguably difficult weather?
Most of my sunflowers either cooked or drowned. Zinnias are battered, even the cosmos are looking beat, but Dotted Horsemint (Monarda punctata) is healthy and in full bloom, attracting hives of bees, large wasps, and plentiful butterflies to its fragrant (some say pungent) blooms.
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The large wasps with 4 yellow spots on their thorax are called Scoliid Wasps. In Florida they are rarely seen except for the couple of months in late summer when the horsemint is blooming. They are pretty docile, drunk on the nectar of the horsemint so I can get really close when taking their picture. The species is Pygodasis quadrimaculata. I've heard the wasps described as the "monster" wasp as they pull the entire plant over landing on each flower. The wasps average around 48 mm (2-inches) but can be much larger. Read more about Scoliid Wasps here.
September in the Florida Garden
The horsemint will last through September though the blooms will fade and the plants will lose a lot of their foliage. Now is the time to plant new. You can find these anywhere in Florida along rural roadsides. Take the dried flower heads (that will turn black) that are full of seeds and broadcast in your garden. They will be healthy plants by mid-February, being among the first plants to sprout in your spring garden. However, you'll have to wait for the blooms until late July of next year. I had a few specimen that bloomed through June and July this year but they were outliers.
You'll notice longer shadows in your garden in September as the days are getting shorter. The sun's track is headed south as we approach the autumnal equinox. Shorter days will by early November deliver cooler and drier conditions. This change of seasons signals time to prepare for dry season Florida vegetable gardens.
You'll first want to remove all the grassy weeds from your garden. These weeds hide a menace; Fire Ants. Due to the increased rainfall of late August and early September fire ants have gone just below the surface. Be careful where you step and when you're pulling weeds keep an eye on your hands. I recently pulled up a nest of fire ants with a weed and they were in my gloves and hat and down my shirt before I saw them. You'll feel the hot blade like sensation of their bite often before you see the ants.
Once the weeds are removed you'll want to make sure our soil is in good condition. I only add Black Kow brand soil to my garden. Everything else you'll buy at garden centers and big box stores is full of tree bark and other mulch that we just don't need, and don't need to pay for. Well-worn Black Kow mixes well with our sandy soils and is mostly (though not completely) soil.
If your garden will be breaking new ground this year, take time now to cover the area with clear plastic to allow solarization, the heat of the sun, kill weeds and grass that occupy the space for at least four weeks. Do this before cultivating so that you are not simply turning under alive weeds that could sprout back. Doing this now will get your garden ready to spring into action when your seedlings are set to go into the ground.
A lot of people prefer to start seedlings in flats for both small and larger seeds, or six-pack cells (larger seeds one to a cell) and then transplant into the ground after true leaves have formed. Seeds emerge with primary leaves and eventually form “true” leaves as they grow and develop a root system. Start seeds in a more of the same soil from your new garden (black kow mixed with sand). Start saving those plastic six-packs and small plastic pots, because they will come in handy as the season progresses if you prefer this method.
As the seedlings in flats mature, carefully tease the plants apart and plant each in a six-pack, one to each cell to allow the development of a good root system before it goes into the ground. That way when you do plant them, they are easier to space out, do not get “lost” in the garden and are ready to jump into action. The only exceptions would be carrots and sweet peas which do not transplant well.
I'm more of a traditionalist and often spread seed directly into the soil. Some will live and some will die but it eliminates a lot of extra work.
In Florida, we only have to worry about a few freezes per year, if at all. Last year (2021-22) there were a couple of cold nights in rural areas but no frost at all in the larger cities.
Plant These Vegetables in Central Florida Now
Arugula, Beans, Beets, Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, Cabbage, Carrots, Cauliflower, Celery, Chinese cabbage, Collards, Fava beans, Herbs, Hot Pepper, Kale, Kohlrabi, Lettuce, Mustard, Onions, Radish, Spinach, Swiss chard, Turnips.
Of the vegetables listed I've had the best luck with beans and turnips. I also keep hot peppers of assorted varieties growing year round but you'll want them in the sunniest spot for the short days of January and February.
September is also the time to start biennials like foxgloves, lunaria and hollyhocks for blooms next spring. Biennials like these produce only foliage their first growing season. Their second season they produce flowers and set seed and then die. The problem with these particular plants is that if the seeds are planted in the spring — as is traditional in most areas — they rarely survive the summer heat and humidity here. However, by planting them now they grow in the fall which tricks them into believing that is their first growing season. They go dormant over the winter, awaken next spring for their “second” growing season when they will bloom.
For heat proof annuals start Emperor's Candlesticks and other senna (pea) species. They provide summer-long blooms and require zero care. A native pea species that is especially colorful in the fall is rattlebox. These can be found in open fields anywhere in Central Florida. Look along fence lines. Shake the plant and you'll hear the seeds. I spread them by hand in the fall where I want them in summer. After a few years they do all the work for you. Emperor's Candlesticks are naturalized, rattlebox are native. There's a difference but only subtly so.
Queerbaiting and Harry Styles
an essay by Anna Marks
originally published as
"Harry Styles Walks a Fine Line"
in the New York Times
August 27, 2022
Harry Styles, this summer’s pop prince, has earned his crown by capturing the fantasies of millions and taking what seems like a groundbreaking approach to the presentation of gender fluidity and sexual identity. While growing his kingdom and conquering pop culture, Mr. Styles has — with his last two album releases — also been accused of queerbaiting: In this case, using queerness to burnish his celebrity without explicitly claiming to be queer.
Discussion of anyone’s identity, even a celebrity’s, is inherently fraught. But in a culture obsessed with identity politics and still constrained by homophobia, it’s inevitable that we look at our icons and wonder who they really are, especially when their style and mystique seem to invite us to ask questions.
Mr. Styles’s performance (and exorbitant ticket prices) makes his identity our business. He skips onstage with what has become the most corporate-friendly symbol of resistance, a rainbow flag. He deals in less obvious symbols of his possible queerness, too: sizable flowers pinned to a lapel (as Oscar Wilde was known to wear), a scrap of blue fabric dangling suggestively from a back pocket (like the Village cruisers), the words “Never Gonna Dance Again” tattooed across his feet (the croon of the once closeted, later proudly out George Michael).
But when he speaks, Mr. Styles tells us a different story. He has consistently declined to claim queer identity or label himself when questioned by the press. This year, in a glossy profile in Better Homes & Gardens, he said of sexual orientation: “I’ve been really open with it with my friends, but that’s my personal experience; it’s mine.”
His desire to live away from prying eyes isn’t surprising. Tabloids and fans have spun stories with varying degrees of credibility about Mr. Styles’s romantic life since he was a teenager, linking him to myriad women (and the occasional man). In a recent profile, Mr. Styles called assumptions about his dating life — and therefore any smoke signals about his sexual orientation they might send — bunk, stating, “I don’t think I’ve publicly been with anyone.”
It’s difficult, then, to reconcile two of Mr. Styles’s seemingly incompatible public identities, both heartbreaking to many queer fans like me. One, Mr. Styles, assumed a straight man, appropriates the imagery of a marginalized community. Another, Mr. Styles, closeted, performs queerness, presumably in the hope that his community might hold out the palms of their hands and welcome him.
In private, Mr. Styles could, of course, claim any — or many — of a spectrum of gender identities and sexual orientations. But the issue at hand is that Mr. Styles asks us to revel in his performance without giving us the key with which to unlock that performance’s true meaning. It’s worth asking why his door is locked.
If Mr. Styles contends with a closet, it was built by a homophobic culture, not any action of his own. Accusing him of queerbaiting his fans works like a kind of trap; he can only really deny the accusations by coming out and identifying himself in a way that would not be wholeheartedly accepted by the public.
So consider this for a moment. Is it really so inconceivable that one of the most famous people in the world could be trapped in the same closet as you or me?
As a queer person, it’s impossible for me to look at Mr. Styles’s use of our symbols with such dexterity, consistency and precision and not see those symbols for what they surely must be — evidence that he is one of us. Perhaps I lack the cynicism to believe that anyone could dare to earn so many, many millions by brazenly appropriating queer culture. Or perhaps I lack the imagination to divine some other meaning — allyship, possibly — from his performance. But even if Mr. Styles’s queerness ends up being just a mirage, I can’t help but believe that it’s better to have been a welcoming fool and wrong than to have been a cruel gatekeeper and right.
Mr. Styles walks a fine line. He can signal to those in the know while safely constructing the myth of Harry Styles the celebrity, a bankable, untouchable cipher that’s designed to appeal to as many fans — and wallets — as possible. The celebrity is a study in contradictions: sexy but nonthreatening, amiable but unknowable, straight but readable as queer. He offers a pretty screen onto which a generation or two can project their sexual, romantic or ideological fantasies. Such a celebrity could never dare to offend anyone by coming out.
I’m not entirely convinced that the public has a right to know how Mr. Styles describes his identity to his friends. But no matter how (or even if) Mr. Styles identifies, we must not look away from the uncomfortable truth about his public image: The celebrity has deployed queer symbols and fashioned himself an ambiguous icon, without touching the messy, unlikable politics of claiming a public label.
In displaying queer symbols as he does, Mr. Styles may indeed be navigating a culture and its closet as best he can. But he also sends young, questioning fans a message that it’s acceptable, perhaps even advisable, to reject the Harvey Milk mantra that has guided so many in the L.G.B.T.Q. community in our struggle for collective freedom: “Every Gay person must come out.”
In the Better Homes & Gardens profile, Mr. Styles elided the issue in one of his few revealing comments on sexual orientation. “The whole point of where we should be heading,” he said, “which is toward accepting everybody and being more open, is that it doesn’t matter, and it’s about not having to label everything, not having to clarify what boxes you’re checking.”
These soft, fluidity-affirming words muffle the danger of the tantalizing fantasy Mr. Styles presents. Implied by his celebrity is the idea that the greatest fights against anti-queerness are over and that it’s good, or at least good business sense, to play coy to appeal to the masses — even those who would rather see you dead than in love.
This position does not meet the challenge of a noticeable rise in anti-queerness in recent years. In the United States, where Mr. Styles commands the stage, anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bills have become fixtures of many state legislatures. In Eastern Europe, where he toured earlier this summer, L.G.B.T.Q. rights have regressed. And in plenty of other markets around the globe, our existence is denied, if not outright criminalized. In the face of this hatred, Mr. Styles hasn’t chosen overt rebellion. He proposes an easy-to-swallow plea to “treat people with kindness.” It’s a tired platitude tone-deaf to 2022’s brand of bigotry.
If our community seeks true liberation, Mr. Styles’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” queerness must not be something to which we aspire. It should instead be something that we mourn.
Coming out can be an act of political resistance, but it’s also a celebration. We exclaim to the world: “I’m here! I’m queer! You must accept me!” Maybe that isn’t always a palatable, salable message, but if it is offensive to those who hate us, we must shout it.
No matter how he identifies, if Mr. Styles wishes to dance with our symbols, he would do well to pay more attention to their politics, regardless of whether he dreams with us of liberation.
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