Today is supposed to exceed 30C/86F, so I wanted to make sure the garden got an deep watering this morning. When I had removed the shade cloth from the three beds with fall harvest crops planted, the seedlings seemed to be doing pretty good.

When I returned to cover them this morning, I saw this on one of the beds.

There was no evidence of a critter getting under the chicken wire cover. That suggested whatever ate these leaves was either a really small, light critter, like a mouse (very unlikely, given how many hungry mouths our mama cats have to feed), or it was insects.

My money is on the grasshoppers. 😦

This was, however, the only damage found this morning. The rest was all fun stuff. I was absolutely thrilled to see this.

Our very first Tennessee Dancing Gourd!!!

Somehow, in seeing all the flowers in the plants next to the luffa, my brain just stuck them in the “melons” category. On looking more closely, I found lots of these.

It looks like we are going to have plenty of little spinner gourds growing! They only get a few inches long and, according to one of the reviews I read when I bought the seeds, they are very prolific. The writer claimed their one plant ended up with at least 250 gourds. This was someone with a much longer growing season than ours, so I don’t expect that sort of success, but we should definitely have quite a few from our several plants.

Meanwhile, the flower bud on the nearby luffa plant I saw yesterday, looking like it was starting to open, absolutely exploded into flower this morning! So awesome!

What is also awesome is being able to walk past the squash tunnel and, from any angle, be able to see melons, and knowing that there are more little ones, still hidden under the leaves.

I finally remembered to uncover and read the labels by the winter squash. The ones that are so enthusiastically climbing the wire are the Little Gem variety, with several small squash already forming.

This morning, I finally saw some fruit forming on the Teddy variety of winter squash.

Both of these varieties as supposed to produce small fruit, with a short growing season, so when I hadn’t seen any of the Teddy squash developing, I was beginning to wonder. I am really excited to see the fruit developing now. 🙂

The Re-Farmer