thermometer

Our 2024 Garden: melons, squash, pumpkin progress – and it’s crazy hot out there!

/ Re-Farmer / 5 Comments

According to my weather app, we’re still at 31C/88F, which “feels like” 33C/91F

Well, this evening (it’s coming up on 6pm as I start this), I got photos of our thermometers.

The thermometer in the sun room was reading 39C/102F. This thermometer is against the west wall, about 3/4 of the way up to the ceiling. It does not get direct sunlight on it.

The thermometer outside my husband’s bedroom window was as high as the needle could go. If the numbers went that far, it would be about 60C/140F. This thermometer get blasted with the full sun for most of the day, in a mostly sheltered corner of the house. No shade and rarely any breeze.

The last thermometer is stored in the top of a cat shelter shelf. The shelf is in full sun, but the thermometer itself was in shade inside. It was reading 43C/109F. Of all the thermometers, I’d say that one is the most accurate to how it felt while walking around the garden beds.

Wow.

Honestly, I’ll take that over matching temperatures on the other side of freezing. Not that we see -60C/-76F, but we do see -40C/F at times, and that is far more deadly.

A couple of evenings ago, I took photos of our squash, pumpkins and melons, using my hand for perspective. Today, I did it again – but this time, I found more to take photos of! Since Instagram allows “only” up to 10 photos in a slideshow, I split the squash and melon photos up by beds.

Yes, I was able to find melons in the second bed this time! I had spotted one before, but today I moved the leaves around and found others.

First, there is our single Crespo squash.

I’ve spotted some tiny female flower buds, but so far, there is only one successfully germinated Crespo squash among the three vines.

Next up is the bed with just the Summer of Melons mix melons.

I dug around in the leaves and found some “new” ones, too. In one photo, there are two melons, but the leaves and vines prevented me from getting a photo of them both, individually, so one of them is only half in the frame.

They’re getting big enough that they are starting to look like distinctively different varieties, too.

The next bed is the pumpkins.

The smaller ones are getting noticeably not-small anymore!

The pumpkin vines are getting intertwined with the drum gourd vines. Those have many male flowers, but I have yet to find a female flower anywhere. It’s possible I can’t see any under all the leaves, but I think that’s unlikely. I’m wondering if they are getting enough water? These have a buried gallon water bottle buried next to their bases, so they get watered slowly and deeply, but a gallon of water might not be enough for something like this. I don’t know. It seems to be sufficient for the pumpkins, though!

The next bed is the winter squash interplanted with shelling peas and pole beans.

The biggest squash at the corner of the bed had a friend on its stem!

The next bed is the winter squash interplanted with corn.

Still not very many among these, but they were also transplanted a fair bit later than the first bed.

Finally, there is the second melon bed.

The first and largest one is among the few Summer of Melons mix transplants that were left over. The others, I’m not sure. They look like they are the same variety, but one was on the far side of the single surviving Cream of Saskatchewan water melon, which I know for sure are not from that mix. That would make them Sarah’s Choice melons. We grew those last year, but they were grown in a bed next to two other varieties and the vines were so mixed up, we lost track of which were which. The other melons in this bed would be the Pixie melons.

Oh, wow. I just linked those to where I bought them, and my goodness, the prices have sure gone up!!! Especially for the Pixies!

If you want to compare how fast these have been growing, you can check out the comparison posts I made on July 30 and July 28.

We may not have anything to harvest on a daily basis this year, but we sure to have a lot growing!

If the warmth keeps up, though, we might actually be able to have things to harvest. The bush beans first had to survive the slugs. Then they had to survive the deer. Amazingly, there are some that have recovered enough that they are starting to bloom! So Royal Burgundy bush beans are a possibility.

There aren’t a lot of pole beans, either, but they are also starting to bloom, so we might be able to harvest both the green Seychelles and the purple Carminate beans at some point. Which isn’t going to be easy, with all those winter squash vines growing around them! The shelling peas seem to be very prolific, with lots of flowers and developing pods, but it will probably be at least a couple more weeks before any of those can be harvested. The corn is also going to be a bit longer; they are sure releasing a LOT of pollen right now!

We also have green tomatoes developing, but nothing is even close to ripening, yet. Then there are the summer squash. I have no idea if we’ll get any green zucchini, Magda, Goldy zucchini or White Scallops, but I think we’ll definitely be getting some of the G-Star patty pans to harvest at some point. They’re not blooming yet, but there are buds starting to form, at least.

What a strange, strange gardening year. That rain we had in the spring really messed things up and set things back. We had Saskatoons blooming, but there are no berries – it was probably too wet for the pollinators. The cherry tree by the house isn’t going to have many berries, though there are some that are ripening. One chokecherry tree in the spruce grove is showing berries, but the one next to the main garden area has almost nothing on it. Even among the crab apples trees, there are a couple of trees where I’m not seeing any apples! These are the ones that have small apples the birds like to eat. The ones with apples that we like to eat do have apples on them, so the timing of blooms and pollinating seems to have been just right for those trees, but not the others.

We have plenty of pollinators, though. I don’t usually see them, but when I’m going through the garden, I can hear them buzzing. I will still hand pollinate the squash if I spot a female flower, but the melons have so many flowers that are so small, hidden among so many leaves, it’s all on the pollinators for those!

With the spring set backs, we can only pray to have a long and mild fall to make up for it!

As my SIL once told me some time ago; if we depended on our garden for food, we’d be starving! 😄

I’m working to change that, though! 😁😁

The Re-Farmer

The heat continues, and the FB saga continues

/ Re-Farmer / 4 Comments

Not a lot of progress outside, today, and only partly because I went out this afternoon.

It’s past 5:30pm as I write this and, according the the weather apps, we’ve cooled down to around 27C/ 81F or 29C/84F, though we most certainly reached higher than 30C/86F today. The high predicted for today was “only” 27C/81F

When I got home, just a little while ago, I saw this reading.

Since we are no longer bringing the transplants indoors overnight, I’ve been leaving the sun room doors wide open, to keep it cooler. There’s a ceiling fan helping things out, too. The thermometer is reading 38C/100F, and it really did feel cooler in the sun room than outside!

We’ve been feeding the outside cats earlier in the evenings, so they can get the food before the racoons clean everything out at night (though a skunk or two will show up any time of day), so I did that after unloading the car by the house, then parking it in the garage.

I tried to get a picture of Adam, but he was camera shy, so I caught him as he was jumping off the cat shelter roof. (It may be hotter up there, but the skunks can’t climb to it.) I haven’t seen Driver in Ages, but Adam has been hanging around, and I’ve been trying to pet him. I’ve managed to touch him, but he really doesn’t like it and goes away to eat somewhere else.

The problem is, I’m starting to think Adam is female. With the long fur, it’s hard to be certain without being able to cop a feel, which none of us has been able to do, but I would expect to at least be able to tell if there are some boy parts under that fur.

*sigh*

Which means that two of the white and greys we were unsure about turned out to be female, and now the two remaining black and white’s that we thought were male are female (I was able to confirm with Decimous, but she has not allowed me to touch her, since that one day I was able to scritch her neck and ears). One of the grey tabbies we couldn’t get close to also turned out to be female.

We may be getting a lot of humidity with our heat, but still no rain. The predicted storms either never materialize in our area (my mother’s town got quite the deluge, though!), or the predictions get pushed back another day or two. It never really cools down during the night, either. I’m glad I got a deep watering done this morning, including the Korean pine planted in the outer yard. We’re getting no rain at all.

This afternoon I went to town to meet up with a friend from high school who is in the area for a few days. We ended up having lunch in the shade by the beach. It was so much more pleasant with that breeze coming off the lake! There were even a few sail boats out, and one brave soul in the water, which would still be quite cold this time of year. We had a fantastic visit – and I got to update her, in person, about what happened with my stolen Facebook account. My thief has recently changed my profile name, so at least people won’t be getting confused about that anymore. My profile picture also got changed; apparently, I’ve lost 30 years, about 150 pounds and now dress like a skank.

I’m still bashing my head on the wall with Facebook’s recovery process, which is just broken. oftne, literally. Of all the ways to try and recover my account, there is one that should actually accomplish it effectively. The steps are to first find my old account while logged out of any other accounts I might be using. Then, since I can’t log in using the thief’s email address, I select “try another way”. Then there’s a screen where I can say I cannot access the thief’s email address that is now associated with my original account. It then goes to a screen that explains they will ask for an email they can reach me at, send me a code to that email, then get me to submit proof of ID, which would be checked by a human, to recover my account.

The first time I went through this process, I got the code, but when it was time to confirm my ID, it went to a broken page. I’ve gone through processes that took me to that page many times, and it is usually broken.

Only once did I get to input my email, though. Now, when I get to that instructions page and hit next, it takes me straight to the “submit ID” part – which should be the last step, not the first. I’ve submitted my ID before, and the next page says to expect an email from them… but what email would they be using? I’m logged out of any account. I’ve told them I cannot access the email that shows up with the login for my original account. Would they still be contacting the thief’s account, anyway? I have no idea, because none of this seems to go through a human (even though this part is supposed to be done by both a program, and a real human).

So I continue to report my old account every day. I can’t report it as “imitating me” anymore, but I can report it as a fake account. And I know people still on my original friends list continue to report the scam posts the thief is making from my account. It’s rediculous.

It also makes it so hard to reconnect with people. They have every reason to ignore my friend requests (if I can even find them, or am able to send a request when I do) and the messages I try to send, explaining why they are getting a friend request from me. The friend I met with today told me she had been talking to other mutual friends about the strange posts coming from my account, and these are people I’d sent friend requests to. Requests that must have been declined, because when I find their pages again, I no longer have the option to send a friend request. Hopefully, now that my friend and I have been able to talk in person, she’ll be able to pass on to our mutual friends, which account is really me now. I was also able to explain to her exactly what happened that lead to my account being stolen, rather than hacked, because I did something stupid while distracted, and thinking I was helping a friend.

Facebook’s tech support is such a disaster.

I think scammers count on FB being so useless at recovering accounts, and users giving up because of it, rather quickly. From what I’ve hear from others who have lost their accounts, they basically just started new accounts and moved on after a very short time. I’m thinking that, at some point, I’m going to wear the system down and get some action taken – even if it’s to delete my old account, which would be preferable to having my thief using it to scam people! If it weren’t for that, I would have moved on from trying to recover my account, but… well… it’s not like I have a name that is shared by a lot, or even a few, other people. My married name is one of a kind. I’ve done curiosity searches on my name, and the only things that come up are directly related to me. So someone out there doing scams under my name is causing more direct harm to me than if I had a more common name.

What a pain.

Bah. Enough of that!

Time to go back to coping with this sticky, humid heat we’ve been under!

The Re-Farmer

Morning kitties

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

The mamas are regularly out in full force in the mornings.

I’ve taken to leaving small amounts of kibble on the cat’s house roof, too. Because skunks can’t climb.

No sign of kittens today, yet.

We’ll have to remember to switch out the frozen water bottles in their bowls several times today. It’s supposed to get quite hot.

Not this hot! This is what the bean tunnel thermometer was reading at about 10:30am. Our high of the day is expected to be 26C/79F, and it’s already 24C/75F as I write this. The weather app says the “feels like” reading is the same but, clearly, it feels a lot hotter while in direct sunlight!

It looks like all of our male cats have disappeared. The only ones left are Sad Face and The Distinguished Guest – and they hate each other and often fight, so they tend not to be around at the same time.

Speaking of fighting, I heard some snarling outside the living room window last night. I headed out with a flashlight, and a huge racoon was near the window, snarling and warning me off. It ran off, then back again, then snarled in a different direction, which is when I saw the second, smaller racoon at the feeding station.

I left them be.

The Re-Farmer