The predicted rain never came today, but then, neither did the predicted high of the day, so I went ahead and watered the gardens in the late afternoon.
Having mentioned the Ozark Nest Egg gourds in my previous post, I just had to get a picture when I found this.
A single Ozark Nest Egg flower blooming. Still no gourds, though; all the buds appear to be male flowers, so far. There is nothing on the nearby Thai Bottle Gourd at all. If there are any flower buds, I can’t see them. The down side of having to add the mesh over these is that we can’t reach under it to handle the plants with undoing part of it!
While the Ozark gourds are still just starting to reach a point where we can train them up the fence, the nearby cucamelons have shot their way to the top of the fence and are looking for more height! They are such fine, delicate vines, and you can barely see many tiny little yellow flowers all over them.
Many of the flowers have teeny little cucamelons under them. :-) They are such prolific plants!
Speaking of prolific, the melons are certainly attracting a lot of pollinators to their many flowers! This is one of the Halona melons.
I love how incredibly fuzzy the baby melons are!
I decided to count what melons I could see. Not the little ones like this, but the larger ones, at least the size of a golf ball. I counted a dozen Halona melons, and another nine Pixies! If they keep up with their blooming, and their ratio of male to female flowers, we could potentially have a lot more than that, if they have enough growing season to fully mature.
There’s always that “if” factor, when it comes to gardening, isn’t there? :-D
I just have to start with the exciting part. We actually got rain today!
Okay, so it was maybe only for about 20 minutes, but it was a nice, gentle, steady rain, and enough that after several hours, the ground is still damp. Not only that, but we’ve got a 90% chance of more rain overnight and into tomorrow morning.
Thank God!
Hopefully, by then, the smoke will finally clear out of the air, and some of that rain will hit the areas that have fires right now.
It is not going to make up for months of drought and heat, but it will certainly help. Even the completely dry, crispy grass has started to wake up and show green already.
It was lovely and cool when I did my rounds this morning, then a daughter and I went and checked all the garden beds just a little while ago.
I’m really glad we set up the chicken wire over the gourds and cucamelons. I found this critter damage this morning. It looks like something, likely a woodchuck, leaned on the wire and managed to nibble on a leaf through the gaps. Just one leaf here, and another on the other side of the chain link fence. Without the wire, we probably would have had a lot more damage.
While I was checking on these, Nosencrantz was playing on the concrete block leaning on a tree nearby, so I paused to try and get her to come to my hand. I managed to boop Nosencrantz’s nose before she ran away. Toesencrantz, on the other hand, was far more interested in trying to get at a lump of dirt on the other side of the chicken wire! He could get his paws under the wire, but the tent pegs held and he couldn’t get the lump out. Not for lack of trying! So that confirmed for me that the kittens were doing the digging in the dirt. More reason to be glad for the wire! The dirt lump got broken up, so as to remove further temptation.
The cucamelon plants looks so tiny, but they are starting to develop fruit! The chain link fence gives an idea of just how tiny these are. I’m looking forward to seeing how they do in this location, which gets more sun than where we grew them last year. They produced quite well last year, for a plant that’s supposed to have full sun.
While checking things out with my daughter, I found new critter damage. When I checked the bed this morning, the damage wasn’t there. These are the Champion radish sprouts. Not all of them were eaten, and the purple kohlrabi sprouts next to them seem to have been untouched. Which would lead me to think it was grasshoppers, not a groundhog, except that after the rain, there were NO grasshoppers around. I didn’t see any in the morning, either, but I usually don’t, that early in the day. They tend to come out later.
Unfortunately, this bed has only the wire border fence pieces to hold up the shade cloth. We are out of the materials to make another wire mesh cover, so with the shade cloths not being used, this bed is unprotected, and there’s really nothing we can do about it right now. :-( On the plus side, it wasn’t a total loss, and I’m thinking the woodchucks, at least, are preferring the easy pickings under the bird feeder.
At the squash tunnel, we found this lovely friend, resting on a Halona melon flower. The melons, winter squash and gourds are doing quite well right now, though all the garden beds are due for another feeding. The baby melons are getting nice and big, and we keep finding more. I was really excited when my daughter spotted this, hidden under a leaf.
These are the first flower buds on the luffa! I was really starting to wonder about them. They started out well, then went through a rough patch, but since I started using the soaker hose, they are already looking more robust again.
In checking the onion beds, my daughter spotted an onion that had lost its greens completely, so she picked it. It will need to be eaten very quickly. It is so adorable and round! This is from the onions we grew from seed. Though I’ve trimmed the greens of almost all the onions, we’re finding some of them with broken stems. Most likely, it’s from the cats rolling on them, as I’ve sometimes seen Creamsicle Baby doing.
We also found a green zucchini big enough to pick. I’ve checked all the plants, and while there should be at least one golden zucchini, I’m not finding any. Every plant is starting to produce fruit now, too, even if just tiny ones, and no golden zucchini. Odd. Perhaps the package was mislabeled and we got a different kind of green zucchini instead? There are differences in the leaves that suggest two different varieties, even if the fruit looks much the same.
Oh, in the background of the onion picture is the Montana Morado corn. We’re always checking them and the nearby Crespo squash for critter damage. There does seem to be some, but I am uncertain what to make of it. One corn plant, in the middle of the furthest row, lost its tassels and top leaves, but none of the others around it were damaged. It has a cob developing on the stalk, so I pollinated it by hand. Then I spotted another stalk, in the middle of the bed, that also lost its tassels. But what would have done that, while ignoring all the other plants around it? Very strange.
And finally, we have the poppies.
The Giant Rattle Breadseed poppies continue to bloom in the mornings, loosing their petals by the end of the day. Their pods are so tiny at that point, but in my hand, you can see the pod from the very first one that bloomed. It has gotten so much bigger!
We also found a couple of these.
My mother had ornamental poppies in here, and even with the mulching and digging we did, some still survived. This photo is of the bigger of two that showed up in an unexpected place: where my daughter had dug a trench to plant her iris bulbs. Somehow, they survived, and now we have two tiny little ornamental poppies. :-D
In hopes that we will get rain tonight, we will not be doing our evening watering. If we don’t get rain, we will water everything in the morning, instead.
Let’s start by enjoying this lovely photo I was able to get this morning.
There were two bees on this sunflower, busily pollinating!
A nice, cheerful burst of sunshine.
I feel like I need it right now.
I had intended to use my mother’s car to run some errands in town today, just to get it on the road. Then my mother called me in the morning, asking for help to do her shopping, so I did my errands at her town, instead. Plus, I got to surprise her with her own car, which is easier for her to get in an out of than our van.
So that worked out rather well.
Of course, it was a visit with my mother, and all that this entailed. It was a pretty good visit, overall, but as usual, it left me drained. As an example of just one of the things that came up, apparently we did our celebration on Sunday all wrong. Not only was she still upset about the ceiling fan, but apparently we each, individually, were supposed to give her cards, there was supposed to be a tablecloth and candles, and after dinner, we were all supposed to make speeches.
???
Never mind that we were originally supposed to have a cookout and be eating outside, or that two other people’s birthdays and an anniversary were being celebrated at the same time. She had an expectation, and we didn’t meet it, therefore it was all wrong.
So is everything about our gardening this year, and the fall planting we’re intending to do later this month.
And so on. Everything is all wrong, because it’s now how she would do it, or the way she thinks it used to be, or how she thinks the “proper” way to do something is.
*sigh*
But that’s okay. Tomorrow, I get to recharge. We are taking my mother’s car out for a longer highway drive, and finally visiting my older brother at his place. He has come out here so many times, yet since we’ve moved in, we’ve managed to go to his place only a couple of times.
It’s going to be really great to see them!
For now, it’s back to recovering from visiting my mom, and appreciating the beauty of bees and sunflowers! ;-)
Last spring, we picked up a bug hotel, to encourage the local pollinators. The top has slots for butterflies, the sides have bamboo tubes, and the middle has pieces of wood cut in such a way that, stacked together, they create holes. These were for native bees, such as mason bees, which do not build nests.
It did not get used at all that summer, so when winter came, I just left it hanging on the tree I’d put it on.
This year, it’s being used!
I can’t tell if the openings at the top are being used by butterflies, but the bamboo on both sides have quite a few tubes used. The middle section doesn’t look like it’s been used by anything at all.
So this fall, when the insects are done with it, we’ll clean it out and take it inside for the winter, as the instructions that came with the packages said to do.
Mostly, it needs to be cleared of spider webs. The roof is just covered with them!
I’m glad to see it being used, and we’ll likely pick up more of them, over time. The native pollinators come out at times more in tune with the local plant life, and that will be important as we plant more food trees and berry bushes over the next few years.
The winds picked up well before the blizzard hit, and the pool noodle bumpers I’d made for the main gate were being blown away. On my way in and out, I grabbed them and quickly tossed them into the van.
As my daughters and I were heading out together, they noted the pieces in the van…
… and a passenger!
It was getting so chilly, the poor little bumble bee was slow and sluggish – but in the relative warmth of the van, she was starting to perk up!
My daughter released it near where the pieces were found. Bumble bees nest in the ground, so we are hoping it had a nest somewhere near there that it could tuck into for the winter!
The trees are starting to put out their leaves, which means the pollinators will be out soon.
Time to put up the mason bee hive we picked up a while back.
We decided to place it near the crab apple trees, since that’s where the most flowers are soon going to be. That meant attaching it to one of the spruce trees.
Which… the box isn’t really set up for.
Under the disc that covers an opening into the butterfly space, there is just this to hang it with. Which might work in some areas, but I can see this falling in the wind, so easily.
I figured I’d try bungee cords, instead.
I had to find a tree small enough that my pair of cords could reach around both the width of the tree, and the depth of the hive.
I also turned it away from the apple trees, so it won’t have the north winds blowing right into the openings. This tree is also surrounded by other trees, providing shade and shelter as well. The next thing I want to do is provide a water source; just a shallow dish with some smooth rocks for the bees and butterflies to land on. I already have appropriate rocks. I just need to find an appropriate container and the right place to set it. Between watering the bird bath and the bee dish, there should also be enough mud available for the bees to use in the hive.
We’ve never had anything like this before, so we shall see how it works out. In the future, we plan to plant bee and butterfly gardens – well away from the house, since my husband is allergic to stings. (Most of the local bee species don’t sting, so it’s more honey bees, wasps and hornets that are of concern.) One of my brothers even has milkweed on his property, so I hope to get some growing here, too. If it does work out, I plan to get more of these, in different styles.
Also in future plans are setting up bat houses and maybe even purple martin houses – both do a great job of eating mosquitoes!
The Re-Farmer 