Today is feeling downright cold!
When I checked the temps in the wee hours, we were at 7C/46F, but it felt like 4C/39F. As I write this, we are now at 10C/50F, but it feels like 3C/37F! The expected high of the day is only 16C/61F.
I don’t know if we got one last rainfall during the night. Wind is the real issue this morning. For the first time in a long time, though, I have not been seeing smoke, so I’m hoping all that rain has made a big difference for the wildfires.
While doing my morning rounds, I finally gave in and took the netting off from above the Arikara squash. The elm seeds are mostly dropped, and it was doing nothing to keep the cats off. In fact, as I was starting to pull the ground staples to remove it, one of the yard cats (a tabby with no name) jumped onto the mesh and immediately fell through over a squash and started to roll around in a panic!
Thankfully, the collars around the squash did their jobs, and nothing was crushed.
What we do have, however, is buds and even a blooming flower!
What is strange is that these are all female flowers. No male flowers! I’m used to the male flowers blooming first. I’m not sure if I should be pruning these off so the plants themselves can grow bigger before starting to bloom again. I’ve never grown these before. I’ll have to look that up. I’d hate to have to prune them but, without any male flowers to pollinate them, the baby squash are just going to wither away, anyhow.
At the high raised bed, I decided to pick these, as the plants were getting big enough to crowd other things out.
I’m leaving one Purple Prince (I think) plant that has bolted to go to seed. Tiny flower buds have started to appear. I picked the other larger ones; perhaps I waited too long and should have picked them at a smaller stage. As for the red thing in the middle, I thought it was a beat, but as I was cleaning and trimming it later, I could see that it’s white on the insides to… a big radish?
That’s one thing about using a seed mix for the winter sowing. This one was a mix of whatever root vegetable seeds I had left. There was only one type of turnip, which makes it easy, but there were several times of radishes and beets, and two types of carrots. One type of radish – the French Breakfast – has a distinct shape that makes it easy to identify. Everything else is “root vegetable surprise”. 😄
I just hope today isn’t so cold that the seeds recently planted will die off and rot instead of germinating. Things are supposed to get sunny and warm up over the next while, without extreme heat, which will be nice. Those overnight temperatures, when they start dropping below 10C/50F, could be a problem, though. The transplants should handle things fine, but the direct sowing… well, we’ll see how those go. At the very least, it will slow germination down.
Well, hopefully, we will have a long, moderate fall and a late first frost, to extend our growing season.
Meanwhile, in the time it took me to write this, our temperature has actually dropped, instead of getting warmer! We’re not supposed to reach our high of the day until 7 or 8 this evening. I’m( seriously considered plugging the cat house in again. It’s overcast enough that the light sensor for the heat bulb will turn on for the kittens.
Definitely “brrrrr” out there!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 