summer squash

Our 2021 garden: morning in the garden, and first lettuce!

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I was rather pleased with this morning’s harvest!

I am just amazed that we still have beans to pick, this late in the season! Even a single yellow bean. :-D

If the mild temperatures continue, we will be getting more yellow beans, too. There are new beans growing, all over the row! From what I could see while picking the green and purple beans, we will have more to pick for at least a couple of weeks, unless a frost hits, first.

After seeing that insanely high reading on this thermometer a few days ago, I’ve been making a point of checking it more often. This time, it seems to be reading low. It was chilly this morning, but not that chilly!

Ah, well. It’s a Dollar Store thermometer. As long as it’s close, it’ll be useful.

This morning was the first time I uncovered the lettuce to weed and thin them. The cover may keep the critters out, but it’s so long, it’s awkward to move on and off, unless there are two people.

These seeds had been from the bottom of a baggie they had spilled into, so I was expecting a mix. It looks like they are almost all the same type, with the exception of two Buttercrunch. Today is the first time we have been able to harvest lettuce this year! The first time we planted them in the spring, the groundhog got to them before we could. The lettuce is just loving these cooler temperatures.

What I am most curious about is this…

There is a tomato plant growing here! It’s looking very strong and healthy, too. I think that’s a dill growing beside it. Dill self seeds easily, but a tomato? Where did that come from? And why did it sprout so late in the season? This bed had spinach in it, first, and this tomato is growing past the sticks marking the ends of the rows I sowed the lettuce in. No additional soil had been added. Very strange!

While weeding this bed, I was on the lookout for the radishes we’d planted in the other half. I found a couple, but they were really tiny. I have no idea what happened to them.

The Bright Lights chard is doing well. We’ve harvested leaves a couple of times from these. They are liking these cooler temperatures.

We have completely abandoned the carrot bed the woodchucks had decimated repeatedly. I’d tried to at least keep weeding it a bit, but it was just too much. And yet, you can see carrot fronds among the weeds! It should be interesting to see what we have, when this bed gets cleaned up for next year.

The Hopi Black Dye sunflower in the old kitchen garden had three stalks with flowers on it. In our recent winds, one of them broke, so I added the supports for the plant to try and save the rest. This morning, I found a second stalk, broken on the ground.

We didn’t really have a lot of wind last night.

I suspect kittens.

I’ve been catching them playing in this garden, right on top of the netting over the carrot bed and the beets by the retaining wall. The carrots are on the edges of the bed, and the kittens have been playing in the middle, so those aren’t as affected, but the beets are being flattened. That bed was already struggling to recover from being et by grogs, and not doing well, so I guess it’s not really a loss, but I find it interesting that the kittens seem to really like playing on top of the netting, instead of on the ground or paths beside it!

Thinking ahead to next year, I believe we have enough salvaged boards in the barn that can be used to make low raised beds here. It would be a good place to make contained areas, such as with square foot gardening, as we turn this into a kitchen garden, and we start to plant more herbs that may have a spreading tendancy. If we have actual frames on the beds, that will make it easier to set up sturdy covers to protect from voracious critters and insects – and playful kittens!

I think we should dig up the rhubarb and transplant them somewhere else. They are not doing well here, likely because they are right under the ornamental crab apple trees.

As difficult and sometimes disappointing as things have been with gardening this year, particularly with the drought, it has showed us a lot about what works, and we can do to improve things for the future.

The Re-Farmer

Morning kitties, and wayward vegetables

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Heading out to do my morning rounds is pretty awesome these days. ALL of the kitties come running!

I even got to give Nosencrantz full body pets – but only while she was eating! Toesencrantz started to come close, but she was too nervous with me being so close, and kept going away. So I left, to give her a chance to eat.

The other eight kittens, plus Potato Beetle, converged on the kibble house! :-D What a crowd! Gosh, they’re getting big. :-)

While I was out by the furthest garden beds, I started hearing some exciting meowing. It took a while, but Rolando Moon came over from wherever she had spent the night across the road, all excited. She let me pet her, then followed me as I went around the garden and made my way back to the house. As we got closer to the house, she would start hissing in between her meows, even though there were no other cats in sight. She was sure on the lookout for a nasty Potato Beetle!

By the time we got to the kibble house, all the other cats were done eating and were gone, so she had a chance to have breakfast in peace.

There were a few squash large enough to pick this morning; a small enough harvest that I could fit them in my jacket pockets! :-D

I found another Madga squash ready to pick, and even one of the mutant sunburst patty pans – the one that’s part green, part yellow – was a nice size to pick, and even one zucchini was ready.

Just one.

While going through the squash tunnel, Rolando Moon ran ahead of me to the end, then flung herself to the ground, waiting for pets.

Right next to a zucchini.

When I had picked squash yesterday, I was carrying them in my arms rather awkwardly, and it looks like I dropped one! :-D

With the fix on our main entry door hinges giving out, we’ve been using the sun room to go in and out of the house. This requires going through a door into the old kitchen, where the cats are not allowed. The door is an old style door with a skeleton key lock on it – though there is no key for it anymore. From there, there is a pair of doors going into the sun room; in the summer, we leave the solid, inner door open. The outer door, which has a window with a screen that we keep partly open for air circulation, is a sort of buffer between the old kitchen and the sun room, in case an outside cat is in the sun room, or an inside cat sneaks into the old kitchen. There are a couple of them that REALLY want to get into the old kitchen!!

Finally, there are the sun room doors. Once again, for the summer, we leave the inner, solid door open, while the outer door, with its screen window partially open for air circulation, is one last barrier. I used to leave the sun room doors open while working outside and have to go in and out frequently, but sometimes an outside cat slips in to investigate and I accidentally close them in when I’m done, so I try to keep that one closed most of the time, too.

When I came into the sun room after finishing my rounds this morning, I spotted a cat jumping off the old wood cook stove in the old kitchen, though the window in the old kitchen door. My initial thought was the Fenryr had once again slipped by me so fast I didn’t see her.

Boy was I wrong.

You see, the old door leading from the house to the old kitchen has… issues. Sometimes, when it seems to be closed, the latch doesn’t actually catch. Then, after a while, the door simply pops open.

By the time I came back, it was wide open, and most of the cats were in the old kitchen, exploring.

As soon as I opened the door from the sun room, there was a rush of cats going into the sun room.

Thank goodness that outside door was closed!!

It took a spray bottle and a few minutes, just to get the cats out of the sun room and into the old kitchen, so I could close that door. Then it took a few more minutes to get them out of the old kitchen and into the rest of the house, so I could close that door. Only then could I empty my jacket pockets of vegetables onto the big freezer, though as I hung my jacket up, I spotted a Nicco in the little niche by the wood cook stove, hiding under my late father’s folded up wheelchair. At that point, I left her along, put things away and, by the time I came back, she came out on her own and I was able to get her to leave.

Inside and outside cats all together, I had 28 cats to deal with this morning! And I didn’t even see the three mamas, yet. :-D

I guess that makes me a crazy cat lady!

The Re-Farmer

Unexpected harvest, and other things

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We were having a lovely rain when I headed out to do my morning rounds. Though we have been getting the odd showers for the past while, things were still starting to dry out. With the high winds yesterday, I actually watered the old kitchen garden, when I noticed all the beet greens were wilted.

With the cooler temperatures and things in the garden winding down, we’re gathering things every few days or so, and the amount we harvest is getting smaller. Mostly, it’s just summer squash. My daughter had recently picked summer squash, so when I went through the garden beds this morning, I wasn’t expecting to actually pick anything.

I was rather surprised to find even a few larger summer squash! The Magda squash have been slow growing this year, so finding two of them large enough to pick is a treat. There are lots of little sunburst pattypans, and after my daughter had already picked the larger ones, I certainly didn’t expect to find more so soon. Yes, I know they can get much larger, but this is the stage we like them best. The only thing that wasn’t a surprise was the big zucchini. Usually, we pick the squash soon after the flowers fall off, but the flower on this one was solidly attached. Even though it was of a size we would normally pick it at, we left it. When I saw it this morning, I just had to pick it. Any bigger, and it’s going to start getting becoming a winter squash! :-D Maybe some day we will let some zucchini reach that point, but not this year. :-)

We are supposed to continue to get showers through the afternoon, but I’m hoping things will have a chance to dry up a bit. I really want to tackle that tree that came down in the wind. We really need to get started on any high raised beds for next year. If we can get even just one bed done, I will be happy. I also need to prepare three beds for the garlic we ordered. I were intending to order double what we got last year, but after talking about it with the girls – and looking at our budget – we got the same amount as before; a collection of racombole, purple stripe and porcelain music, 1 pound each. Though the beds they were planted in before are available, we want to rotate them into other beds that did not have alliums in it. Unfortunately, those beds are still being somewhat used right now! However, if I am able to get enough out of the tree to build a high raised bed, it will have fresh garden soil and amendments added to it, so it won’t matter if it’s in a location that had onions this year.

If it’s too wet to break down the tree today, I should still have tomorrow. The weekend is supposed to get quite hot, and we’ve got plans for Saturday. Next week, we’re supposed to get several days with rain, and then things start cooling down a fair bit. As long as I can get enough pieces cut, while it’s dry, we can get some progress on a bed.

Though our overnight temperatures have not been cold enough for frost, some of the more delicate plants were showing signs of what I would otherwise consider frost damage. Some of the cucamelon leaves are showing signs, and part of a Ozark Nest Egg plant had a vine that was growing the highest, suddenly start dropping this morning.

Everything is all winding down, which means things are getting busier. There’s a lot of work to prepare beds for next year, and getting it done often depends on the weather.

In other things, I’m happy to say that since we installed that shut off valve and, in the process, adjusted the pipe so it wasn’t touching another one, and padded it with vibration reducing material, that very disturbing noise we would sometimes hear seems to be gone. It’s hard to say for sure, since the noise didn’t happen every time the well pump turned on, but so far, it’s encouraging.

Something else seems to have gone away.

The woodchucks.

I haven’t seen any of them in almost a week, now. Usually, I’d at least see one peaking out of the entry to their den under the pile of wood, or eating the bird seeds near the living room window but, lately, nothing. I was wondering if they might have gone into hibernation, so I looked it up. They tend to hibernate from October to February, so it’s still too early for that. But then, the sites also said they mate after the come out of hibernation, and we so them going at it in the summer, so who knows.

Very strange.

Not that I’m complaining! :-D

Our 2021 garden: morning in the garden

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Well, it is getting decidedly cooler when I do my morning rounds! Fall is just around the corner, but things are still holding out in the garden.

Here are the gourds growing on the south facing chain link fence. The yellow flowers that you see are the Ozark Nest Egg flowers.

If you look at the bottom right, you’ll see a white flower!

This is a Thai Bottle Gourd flower. The Ozark Nest Egg plants are going so well, they sort of hide that there is another type of gourd growing here. The Thai Bottle Gourd has leaves that are more rounded, while the Ozark Nest Egg leaves have points on them.

These gourds are not the only thing bursting into bloom.

This is the Crespo squash, recovered from critter damage and growing enthusiastically! I was not able to get all of it in this photo. All those arrows are pointing to flower buds, some of which are starting to open this morning. There are probably another dozen or so on the rest of the plant off the left side of the photo.

Hidden away in the middle, I found the first female flower!

I couldn’t get any closer because of the critter barriers, but that flower bud the arrow is pointing to has a baby squash at its base. Hopefully, it will get pollinated and not die off. Under the current conditions, I would hand pollinate, but that would require moving the critter barriers. Mind you, there’s no way any fruit that develop will reach maturity.

More on that, later.

There are only a few Halona melons left on the vines, but there are probably a dozen Pixie melons that have not yet ripened.

This is the largest of them. Since it has a hammock, I check it in the mornings by lifting it at the stem, to see if it is starting to separate, but it’s still hanging on tight!

The rest are more like these two.

I’ll have to double check, but I thought the Pixies had a shorter growing season than the Halonas. They are taking much longer than the Halona to fully ripen. I’m sure the drought conditions over the summer have something to do with that, but since we’ve started having rain fairly regularly now, I would have expected them to mature faster. Ah, well. We’ll see how they do!

This is the largest of the developing Teddy winter squash. This is roughly half of what it’s mature size is supposed to be, so they may still have time.

Our weird mutant Red Kuri is noticeably bigger! It makes me smile, every time I see it.

We’ve got a couple more that are getting bigger, too. This is what the mottled green one should be looking like, which is why I suspect it was cross pollinated with the Teddy squash.

Here’s something that is NOT getting bigger!

The one luffa gourd is just… stalled. The plants are still blooming, but also starting to die off for the season. I started these quite a bit earlier, indoors, and they should have had enough time to develop gourds and reach maturity, but this summer was so rough on everything, I think we’re lucky to have even this.

We even had something to harvest! Not every morning, but at least every few days. We even still had a few beans left to pick. In the photo, I’m holding one of the mutant green sunburst squash. :-D I’ve been trying to let the sunburst squash have more time for the fruit to get bigger, but they seem to be developing more slowly than they did last year.

I just had to get a picture of the sunflower in the old kitchen garden. We can see it from the bathroom window, through the sun room, and it makes me smile, every time. :-)

As the season winds down, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the long term forecasts. Yesterday was our first frost date for the area, but it continues to look like we are not going to have any frost here, for a while. Of course, the forecast constantly fluctuates, and different sources have different forecasts. My Weather Network app has a 14 day forecast, and with today being the 11th, that puts the 14 day trend between the 12th and the 25th. The lowest overnight temperatures I’m seeing is for the 25th, at 6C/43F, with variable cloudiness.

My Accuweather app, however, is very different. The long range forecast on that one goes up to October 5. Up until this morning, all the overnight lows were above freezing, but this morning, there is now a single night – the 25th – where it says we will hit -2C/28F. It is also predicting thunder showers scattered about the province in that day.

If that is accurate, we have only two weeks before frost hits (which is 2 weeks longer than average, so I’m not complaining!). If we do get a frost, that will be it for the tomatoes, squash, gourds and melons. We have no way to cover any of these beds, so if we get any frost warnings, we’ll just have to pick as much as we can the day before. We should get plenty of sunburst squash, but I’m really hoping the Pixie melons and winter squash ripen before then. The gourd and Crespo squash just don’t have enough time left. Except the Tennessee Dancing gourds. They are so small, we should have quite a few to gather before the frost hits. We may be lucky, though. Aside from that one night that one app is predicting will go below freezing, overnight temperatures are supposed to stay mild into October.

The sunflowers will be a lost cause, though. There is no way the seed heads will be able to mature in so short a time. So many haven’t even opened, yet. Starting some of them indoors would have made the difference (well… except for being eaten by deer), had they been under better conditions. Not just with the weather, but the soil quality where they are growing. Had our only reason for planting them been for the seeds, they would be a failure, but they were planted there partly for a privacy screen, partly for wind break, and mostly as part of our long term plans to prepare the area for when we plant food trees there. Which means we had a success with 3 out of the 4 reasons we planted them. I do want to get more of these seeds to try them again, elsewhere.

For now, every night we have without frost is a help.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: some pruning and cleanup – and we are forewarned!

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While doing my rounds this morning, I decided it was time to do some pruning and clean up around the squash and melons.

With the summer squash, I cut away a lot of the bottom leaves, and anything dead or dying. The zucchini didn’t really need it, but the sunburst squash needed quite a bit.

Noting for next year: while I am happy with training the summer squash to grow vertically, and will probably do it again next year, I now know to make extra certain the support poles are more secure. I thought they were, but as you can see in about the middle of the squash bed, one of them has fallen right over under the weight of the squash attached to it – and I’d already added a second support pole with it! The zucchini on the far right of the photo is also tippy.

We are in a strange sort of state right now, where the squash and melons are continuing to bloom and produce, recovering for the extreme heat and dryness over the summer, but also dying off as they reach the end of their growing season. A couple of Halona melon plants were completely died off and got taken out. The single melon on the ground ground had come loose from one of those.

The three biggest Red Kuri squash are coming along nicely. The mottled green one is quite noticeably bigger. With the colours and slightly different shape, I find myself wondering if it got cross pollinated with one of the nearby Teddy squash.

Speaking of which…

There’s a new one! Of the two plants, one of them now has four squash developing on it. :-)

After I finished pruning the squash and melons, I went through the other beds, doing a bit of cleanup, and found this.

We’ve somehow lost a sunflower!

It doesn’t even look like it was bitten – there is no sign of critter damage anywhere. It looks almost as if it were cut! It’s also in the middle of a row, in the middle of a sunflower block.

Very strange.

I took the seed head inside and put it in a very small bowl, shallow enough for the barely-there stem to reach the water. :-)

As I was finishing up in the garden, the grader went by on the road, and the driver stopped to talk to me. He let me know that he’d seen a black bear – a big male – on our quarter section, and he thought it was heading for the newly dug out gravel pit for water. He’d actually seen 7 bears, just today! The most he’d ever seen in one day – and it wasn’t even 11:00 yet, at the time I talked to him. He suggested we might want to pick up an air horn to carry with us, so if we see a bear, we can use the noise to scare it off.

One of our neighbours, about a mile away, has been posting photos of a bear that’s been raiding – and destroying – his bird feeders. I would not be expecting any to come to our feeding station, though. With both bird feeders broken, I’ve just been tossing a scoop of seeds directly on the ground, so there’s not a lot to tempt them. Especially since we have zero saskatoons and chokecherries this year, and almost no crab apples, thanks to that one cold night in May. Even the ornamental apples in the old kitchen garden, which would normally be full of tiny bunches of apples, and birds eating them, have nothing. No hawthorn berries, either. Between the drought and the wildfires, this loss of berries would be quite widespread, and the bears are starving at a time they should be building up their fat reserves for the winter.

I really appreciated the grader driver stopping to let me know. I have never seen a bear in our yard, but this is not a normal year, so we will have to keep our eyes open!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: morning harvest and first potatoes, makes for an awesome breakfast!

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I finished off my rounds this morning by doing some harvesting in the garden. The beans in particular had plenty to pick. :-)

I found a yellow bean, growing on a green bean plant!

It didn’t get picked. It felt completely empty. Any beans it might have had did not develop. I did find one other yellow bean among the green beans, on another plant, that did have developing beans in it, but it was super soft for some reason.

There as a big enough haul this morning to need two containers! :-)

Among the sunburst squash, we have the one plant that is producing green squash instead of yellow, though some of the developing squash have streaks of yellow in them. An interesting mutant plant! :-D

The yellow beans are pretty much done. We’ll still be picking them for the next while, but just a few here and there.

I found flowers on both green and purple bean plants! Just a few, but still a surprise, this late in the season. We’ll be having plenty of those to pick for a while, from the looks of it. Lots of little ones developing on the plants.

Our first potatoes! We could have picked potatoes earlier, but we’ve been leaving them for now. This morning, I decided to reach into a few bags and dug around until I felt a potato and pulled it up. These are the yellow Yukon Gem and red Norland potatoes. I did not try to pick any of the fingerlings, yet.

That’s a pretty good harvest for the day! There are enough beans there to do another bag for the freezer, if we want. :-)

I used a bit of everything when I made breakfast this morning. :-)

I made a hash using all three types of beans, a couple of sunburst squash, a zucchini, and one of each type of potato. I also used onion and garlic that we harvested earlier. Even the oil I used to cook with was infused with our chive blossoms, and the dried parsley on top is from last year’s garden.

It tasted great, too! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: evening harvest

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While doing my evening rounds, I was able to gather quite a substantial harvest from the garden!

The yellow beans are, as could be expected, winding down right now, but there was still quite a lot of them. There were plenty of green beans, too, but it was the purple beans that stole the show! There were so many ready to pick this time!

I picked a few sweet corn that seems like they might be ready, just to see how they were. Though their silks are drying, they are still quite immature. My expectations are on the low side for these, given how nitrogen poor the soil is, but we shall see as time goes by.

I was really happy to have so many sunburst squash and zucchini! I also had to straighten up a lot of the support poles, as the wind had blown them over somewhat. However, I can definitely say it was much easier to find and harvest the summer squash grown vertically! Last year, I was picking sunburst squash and zucchini pretty much daily, but this is the first time we’ve had a substantial amount to pick. They did not get eaten before we could get to them! The cayenne pepper is definitely working!

I applied more over everything after I finished picking things. The rains would have washed it all off by now. We might get more rain today, then off an on over the next week, but I don’t expect to get much here, so I wanted to make sure the garden beds had their spicy protection.

There was enough picked that we could blanch and freeze some more, but this time I’m keeping them for having with our meals. In fact, I’m enjoying some of those beans with my lunch as I write this, sauteed with our Purple Stripe garlic (crushed and chopped) in butter, then braised until tender, then seasoned and stir fried with rice and some of the grass fed beef we got with the package we ordered a while back. It turned out very well!!

It may almost be the end of August, but we’re finally getting to where we can probably eat from our garden every day. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden; a modest morning

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Thankfully, I did not find much critter damage in the garden at all today.

Sadly, this Magda squash got chewed on overnight. I had been really looking forward to picking it when it got bigger!

After doing the manual watering, then setting up the sprinkler on the corn, I pruned the bottom leaves on the summer squash. With growing them vertically, the idea is to not have any leaves touching the ground, thus reducing the chances of fungal infections. Ours are not tall enough for all of them to be at that point, but we’re close. I left the pruned leaves under the plants they were cut from, to add to the mulch, and maybe even discourage critters from coming too close and stepping on spiky stems.

Not that it helped the Magda squash, any!

More of the Mosaic Medley mix of tomatoes are starting to ripen. I didn’t pick any this morning, but I think we’ll have a fair number to pick by this evening!

We don’t know what varieties are in the Mosaic Medley mix and, so far, we’re only seeing red ones. In the photo on the site, there were some “chocolate” ones shown. I’m still holding out hope that some of these will ripen to colours other than red! :-) Not that it makes a difference to me. I don’t particularly like tomatoes. They’re one of the few things that are doing well, and NOT being eaten by something, so I’m pretty excited about them, anyhow. :-D

Today is supposed to get quite hot (we’re at 32C/90F as I write this, and we’re supposed to still get warmer), so I made sure to put the shade cloth over the fall crops. I neglected to take a photo, but I was very surprised to see bulbs forming in the row of French Breakfast radishes! I’ll be leaving them alone. We didn’t plant many, as they are for their pods, not their bulbs, and I’m amazed they survived the grasshoppers at all. Even the chard in that bed is recovering. I’ll have to get some photos when we uncover them when we do the evening watering.

One thing about all the struggles we are having with our garden this year is, we are learning a lot that we can use next year, to improve things. Some of them were things we already intended to do, and the only change is in priority.

With having such far flung beds, we knew that watering would be a challenge. Especially since we knew the furthest beds were in the hottest, driest part of the yard. The excessive heat and drought conditions certainly didn’t help, either! One of our ultimate goals is to have a garden that requires little to no watering. I was able to watch the Back to Eden documentary (free on Tubi), and it’s very much what I had in mind, when it comes to the heavy mulching. We have all these branch piles everywhere, just waiting to be chipped, that would have been so incredibly useful this year! Even with the modified hugelkultur method we plan to use with our permanent high raised beds, we intend to use a lot of mulch. Though we plan to work out some sort of irrigation system to make our watering as efficient as possible, if we do our beds right, we should rarely have to water them, even during drought years.

Which will be a huge improvement over having to water once or twice, every day!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: progress, and next steps

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With hot, dry days returning, my morning rounds once again includes covering the fall crop beds with shade cloth and doing a morning watering.

I was very, very happy to check the bean beds and FINALLY see pods developing! Other local gardeners are already harvesting large amounts of beans, while ours were still just blooming. Yesterday, I spotted the tiniest of pods developing – so tiny, I didn’t bother trying to take a photo, because I knew my phone’s camera wouldn’t be able to focus on them. This morning, I spotted these.

There are pods developing on all three types of beans.

While I had the sprinkler going over the corn and sunflowers, I worked on the summer squash bed. They have gotten big enough that I pruned the bottom leaves and staked them higher on their supports. There were a couple I had already done not long ago. Besides those, all of the squash were staked higher.

Not that you can really tell in the photo, at this point.

While I was working, as spotted a couple of plants with nibbled leaves, and even a nibbled sunburst squash. As we keep training the squash vertically, and keep pruning the bottom leaves, it should make it harder for ground critters to be able to reach to nibble on them. Which was not among the reasons we wanted to try growing squash vertically this year, but I’ll take it!

I didn’t take any photos because the sprinkler was running, but the sweet corn is starting to develop tassels! Switching to using the sprinkler to water them, and leaving it to run for anywhere from 30-60 minutes has made a visible difference.

When we build our permanent beds, we definitely need to have some sort of drip irrigation system, so we can be less wasteful with watering.

The Re-Farmer

2021 garden: odd one out, and barrier attempts

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We are once again hitting higher temperatures, with no more rain, so this morning I started watering the garden beds again, moving the sprinkler every half hour or so. While checking the conditions of the various beds, I had to get a photo of this summer squash. It was the last one to start producing fruit, and when it finally did, it was definitely the odd one out.

And what is so odd about this lovely green pattypan squash?

We only bought yellow pattypan squash seeds.

So… we planted both green and yellow zucchini, but only have green zucchini developing. Then we planted only yellow pattypans, but have both green and yellow squash!

Too funny.

While checking the beds I’d watered last night, I was disappointed to find that more of the Crespo squash has been eaten. :-( So I snagged a daughter to help me put the last of our chicken wire around it.

We didn’t have enough to go all the way around. I checked the junk pile around the garden shed and found some 2 inch square wire mesh. It was all bent up – when I first found it while cleaning up the maple grove, it was buried in undergrowth – and a mess, but we straightened it the best we could and happily found it long enough to cover the gap left by the chicken wire. I used some other scrap wire that was tangled up in the mesh and used it to attached the pieces together near the ground, so no little critter could just slip in between them.

I’m hoping it works. It’s going to make filling the water reservoir in the middle (half buried, so water the roots) more difficult, though.

I’ll put up with it.

The Re-Farmer