The First Dog Day Cicadas Over the Kansas Patch

The first one started up a little after four in the afternoon, somewhere in the cottonwood at the edge of the patch. One long, dry, rising buzz that swelled and then trailed off, like someone slowly turning a dial. By the time I walked the rows that evening there were three or four of them answering each other across the yard. The dog day cicadas are back, and that sound means high summer has truly arrived on the Kansas prairie.

People call them dog day cicadas because they show up in the hot, heavy stretch of late June and July, the dog days, when the corn is tall and the afternoons go still. Unlike the periodical broods that surface every thirteen or seventeen years, these annual cicadas come back every single summer. Some part of me waits for them. The garden can be loud with work in May. By the end of June it settles into a different rhythm, and the cicadas are the soundtrack of it.

What the Dog Day Cicadas Are Really Telling You

A cicada spends most of its life underground, years of it, feeding quietly on root sap in the dark. Then one warm night it climbs out, splits its shell, and sings for a few short weeks. I think about that more than I probably should. So much of growing food is the same kind of patience. You tuck a seed into the soil and nothing seems to happen for a long while, and then one morning the whole patch is singing.

The cicadas also tell me to slow down and pay attention. Their hum lines up with the time of year when the pumpkins stop sulking and start to run. If you have been out in your own rows lately you know the feeling. The vines reach a foot a day, the first squash bees are working the blossoms at dawn, and the whole thing feels like it is finally in motion. I wrote a little about that turn of the season in the post about the garden running now, and the cicadas are the part I left out.

High Summer Is Still a Good Time to Keep Planting

Here is what surprises a lot of new gardeners about the dog days. They are not the end of anything. In Kansas there is still plenty of warm season left, and a second sowing of fast squash put in now will catch up before frost. That is the whole idea behind succession planting squash, tucking a few more seeds in while the soil is warm so the harvest keeps coming well into fall. The cicadas singing overhead are as good a planting reminder as any calendar on the wall.

I try to garden in a way that leaves room for them. That means no broad sprays, a few corners left a little wild, and the leaf litter under the trees left where it falls. Cicadas do not bother the pumpkins, and the birds that follow them, the cardinals and the brown thrashers, eat far worse pests than any cicada ever was. Working with the whole web of the yard instead of against it is slower, but it is the kind of slow that pays you back. The same yard that hums with cicadas in July is the one full of lightning bugs after dark and squash bees at sunrise.

An Evening Worth Standing Still For

My favorite hour right now is the one just after supper. The heat finally lets go, the light goes gold and long, and I carry a cup of Prairie Blaze out to the edge of the rows. The cicadas wind down as the fireflies wind up. It is the closest thing to a shift change in nature that I know. I do not bring my phone out there. I just listen, and notice how much the vines moved since morning.

If there is a small invitation in all of this, it is to let the dog day cicadas be your cue to step outside and stand still for a minute. Pour something good, watch the bees, count the new blossoms. The season is loud and generous right now, and it does not last forever. If you are already dreaming up next year's patch, our garden seeds will be right here whenever you are ready. But tonight, the cicadas have it handled.

From the patch in Newton, Kansas.