I just got back in from taking comparison photos in the garden. It’s just past 7pm now, and we’re just barely starting to cool down. We most definitely broke 30C/86F today, though I don’t know by how much, or what the humidex was. As I write this, we’re down to 28C/82F, with the humidex putting us at 30C/86F – which I think is off by a few degrees! It certainly feels hotter than that out there to me!
But, everything is looking good in the garden. The morning watering is keeping everything from wilting away in the heat. The corn has reached pollination stage, but we don’t have much wind today, so I’ve been shaking them to pollinate the silks, and can see clouds of pollen coming off the tassels! I am so looking forward to trying this variety of corn. Such a short growing season isn’t worth much if we don’t like the corn! π I see some potential problems with growing them in with the winter squash, though; some of the vines have started to climb the corn! The stalks will not be strong enough to hold that kind of weight!
I did not do any comparison photos of the developing melons, squash, etc., using my hand as perspective, yesterday. So we’ll be looking at two days growth from the photos I last posted.
Except for this one!
This is our first Crespo squash! I hand pollinated it, and it took, so I put a brick under it to keep it from potentially getting a rotten spot on the grass. I would love to get even just one fully grown Crespo squash, but it’s the end of July, so chances of that are pretty low, unless September ends up another warm one without frost – which may be possible, this year.
In the pumpkins, where I’d put a board under two smaller ones, you can see that the smaller one is turning yellow and withering away. Pollination didn’t take on that one.
I’m really impressed by how many pumpkins we have from just these two vines!
Among the winter squash, I found one that looks like it took and put a board under it. I also got shots of a couple that may have taken, but they haven’t dropped their flowers yet, so I might be jumping the gun to include them here.
I’ve been looking through the Vesey’s squash selection to try and determine what the varieties are, but it looks like the seeds in their Wild Bunch Mix are not sold separately! At least not all of them.

This is the image from their website for this product. I recognize Red Kuri in the photo, which we’ve grown before and really like. The image includes a squash I know is called Turks Turban, which is one of the squash we’ve got developing, but that one isn’t sold separately.
Oh! I just realized I forgot to get a photo of one large one! Excuse me while I go back out and fix that…
Done…
I can’t believe I forgot one of our largest developing winter squash! It is completely covered by leaves, so getting to it, and getting a photo, is a challenge. I think I can see which it is in the product image, but I don’t see that one among the seeds they sell individually.
Well, once they are ripe, I’ll have to look around online to see if I can identify the other varieties. The main reason we got this mix was to see which ones we like the most, so we can buy just those in the future. Eventually, I want to get ourselves down to just a couple of varieties – three at most – that grow well here, and that we enjoy eating – so that we can save seeds. That’s sort of the goal for most of the things we are growing, really, including the Summer of Melons mix.
Anyhow. I’ll probably take these comparison photos every couple of days, even though some of them show visible growth just from one day to the next. Especially when they are smaller. I like being able to go through the photos later on and really see how much they’ve grown in such a short time!
Tomorrow morning, I’ll be doing the early watering again, before heading to the city for our Costco shop. It’s also local election day for our municipal council, so I’ll be sure to vote before heading to the city.
As an aside, I’ve been playing with the AI assistant function on WordPress. The “generate feedback” keeps telling me I need to break up my long paragraphs. So often, I’ve taken another look at my posts to see if my paragraphs are really that long. I don’t think they are, in the posts I’ve done this with, but the AI sure seems to think so! It also keeps telling me to use subheadings to break things up. I’m not that kind of blog! It suggests adding images, too, though a few times it does recognize that I’ve used Instagram to include images.
What’s really funny is using the AI to generate images based only on the content of the posts. The AI does not know what a vegetable garden looks like. Or strawberry beds. Or a grocery store! At least the cat and kitten images look not too bad. ππ The post I wrote about the washing machine being somehow turned on by the cats and flooding our entry was probably the funniest. I wrote about draining the water with a hose extending through the door.
It decided we had a washing machine sitting outside the door, with decorative nic nacs on top. ππ
None of them have been useable for my posts, though. I haven’t tried to tell it what to make for an image manually since I tried to get it to create an image of a mosquito some time ago.
The AI doesn’t know what mosquitoes look like, either.
Too funny!
The Re-Farmer
[Ahahahaha!!! I just tried the feedback option for this post, and it suggested I use the AI to generate images for it. πππ]

Lovely photos, and your weather seems very similar to ours so I wouldn’t be totally surprised if you had things growing into Sept. this year. AI is like a crazy artistic lady; I avoid AI, too. π
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