Honestly there are times I wonder why I bother having a garden. I am going to do my best to come up with a few positive paragraphs but this week has been simply exasperating. It has been hot and dry — my least favorite weather conditions after hot and windy and dry. I admit I prefer a cool misty day.

Then there has been the onslaught of insects. I had barely finished the transplanting of the vegetable seedlings when every possible pest has emerged with all their friends. I have the striped cucumber beetle as you write home about. We’re talking making lace of the leaves of not only the cukes but summer and winter squashes, pumpkins, watermelons and cantaloupes. I sprayed everything with neem oil, the first thing I came across. Then I read the directions — I should have used Koolin clay on the pests. One good thing, I have a good friend and garden partner, Marie. She uses the Internet and is ordering the product. I’m a big hypocrite about the computer. I’m smug about not having one but yet coerce friends to do cyber favors for me.

Last week’s application of the Colorado potato beetle BT solution seems to have thwarted them on my eggplants. The newly emerging leaves are intact. Hopefully I will continue to use spinasod or BT on a biweekly schedule.

I believe the reason for all these bugs is that the garden is only a year old with barely adequate soil. We have trucked in a tremendous amount of compostable leaves, grass clippings and perennial bed debris. All of these materials may have harbored larvae from previous years. I do have faith, however, that given time and human endurance we can set it right. Oh, did I mention money? I’ve purchased enough North Country organic fertilizer to warrant remortgaging the house.

I’m crazy about the Cape Cod rambling rose. I love the way it insinuates itself up into cedar trees, along stone walls and right into otherwise unlovely brush. As one comes down State Road about to turn onto the Edgartown Road, there are two ramblers, one of each color on the split rail fence. Then there is the beautiful purple rose bush about which I have commented in the column for four years. I keep threatening to knock on the door and ask for a slip. Who knows the proper time to attempt the rooting of a rose from a slip?

This is a banner year for hydrangea. The are simple bursting with blossoms already. I love the combination of the orange daylily and blue hydrangea. It is so very Vineyard. Throw in a Cape Cod rambler and you’ve got a picture postcard. Those orange daylilies have come back into my good graces. I found them boring and common in my early years gardening. Now I’ve come to appreciate their height, predictability and deer resistance. All the hybrids, while lovely, do require a bit of tending.

How about the House of Representatives member Barton (R-Tex.) last week? He actually apologized to BP for President Obama extorting $20 billion from them to be placed in an escrow account. The money is to be used for compensation to victims of the horrific environmental disaster caused by the shoddy, unregulated practices of British Petroleum. Rep. Barton is not alone. To wit, Michelle Bachman. How is it even possible for these people to say these things with straight faces? Again, just follow the money. I realize that anything President Obama does is up for criticism.

Stephen Colbert said it all . . . he said if the oil leak happened on Ronald Reagan’s watch, Reagan would have gone down there, stripped to his skivvies, put a knife in his teeth, swam down a mile and sealed the leak himself. Oh, for the good old days of Republican Presidential amnesia.