I have two things to write about today. The first, of course, is the garden. Everybody except the yellow squash and green beans are making food. As annoying as it is that the two I want most are being recalcitrant the rest seem to be trying to curry favor by producing. There is one acorn squash that is set and growing and at least two other female flowers that will bloom this week. The thing I find interesting about the plants with distinct male and female flowers is that the female flowers have the fruit / vegetable / seed pod / whatever already in the stem behind the flower and it looks like a miniature version of the end product even before the flower is fertilized.
Tasty squash
Male and female acorn squash flowers
Female cucumber flower
It turns out that the edamame plants I thought were going to bloom were actually already blooming and they just have tiny flowers. This week every single plant developed little bean pods. I am going to have a lot of soybeans to eat. Om nom nom.
Beans!
Edamame forming in the flowers
The three corn plants that are actually growing and not being pathetic have produced flower stalks. And the cherry tomatoes are starting to ripen. I’ll probably have tomatoes to eat starting at the end of this week. I don’t know if you’re supposed to wait until an entire bunch is ripe or if it’s appropriate to pick off ones that are ripe and eat them.
Oh no! The corn!
I’m planning to learn how to make pickles since I’m going to have a ton of cucumbers (fingers crossed) and I like pickles. One of my favorite things when I was little was eating the pickles my grandmother made. I don’t know if its within my abilities to make pickles like she did but since this whole thing has kind of been done with an eye looking back at my grandparent’s garden I think it’s appropriate to at least try.
Finally, a non-garden related thing. I picked up a book to learn how to program in Python since several of the applications I play with in my free time have Python scripting interfaces. Of course playing with Python became more interesting than being able to script things in those programs so I’ve been writing a little menu application with my free time. It actually works now though it has a long way to go before I could call it useful with a straight face but it displays icons and launches programs and can understand and navigate through submenus. I’ll put a screen shot of it here though that’s not terribly useful since the neat part is when you’re actually moving the mouse around in it. The icon behavior is similar to the Mac Dock magnification except that it’s in a circle and the magnification actually permanently pushes the icons around where in the Dock when your pointer exits the active area all of the icon return to their original locations. Maybe I can work out a animated gif file to give an idea. It uses the wxPython wrappers for wx Widgets. It works pretty well but there is no way to make the background transparent without (possibly and I don’t even know if it’s possible) some OS / window manager depended shenanigans. Also, the the icon set I’m using is called Legendora and was made by someone called Raindropmemory on deviantart. It’s super cute and she has a lot of icon sets which are all just adorable.
