Category: Gardening

This little guy thought he was pretty smart. When the fingers get close he moves around to the far side of the vine he’s sitting on. What he doesn’t handle well is getting flicked against the stem he’s on and having various bits of his insides become his outsides. It reduces mobility, having the insides on the outside. Mobility is important if you want to avoid arrest, photography and being wadded up in the means of your capture and thrown into the garbage. I don’t know if this is a squash bug variant or just some random critter who was in the wrong place at the wrong time but it has paid the price for its lack of vision. The garden is doing as well as can be expected. More cherry tomatoes today including three that were a bit too close to the netting and were savaged by something that should instead be eating the bugs off my cucumbers. Still, the nets seem to be doing their job for now so the computerized sentry guns can wait.

The reason my soybean plants look so sad is that they have the bean mosaic virus. Many of my soybean plants are losing or have lost their leaves. There’s not much you can do about the virus unfortunately so I may not end up getting to eat any of the soybeans on those plants as they may die before the pods are ready. It looks like the green beans also have the mosaic virus but are more resistant to it so are still growing. In fact several of them started blooming this week. The wrinkly leaves and mottled coloration are the indicator. Gardening hard. I’ve had some tomatoes off the cherry tomato plant and they were good (for tomatoes (not my favorite)). When I got home on Thursday evening the five farthest along had each developed a split down the side so I picked them off, cut out the split part and ate the rest. I had another one yesterday and it looks like four or five more will be ready tomorrow or Tuesday. The squashes are coming along. I have some yellow squash now which is nice. One of those might be ready to eat late next week. The cucumbers have already reached the top of the fence I put up last week. I expect they will try to take over the world some time next month. I also have the silk from two ears of corn on the farthest along corn plants.

edit: On an unrelated note, while 0 is a valid list index it also tends to evaluate to False. :|

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.

We have had rain almost once a week all spring. It’s great. No watering and all the little growing things are excited to be alive. Things have been moving right along in the garden. Several plants have started blooming and the tomatoes all have fruit on them though the Rutgers tomato only has one and hasn’t produced many blooms. The cherry tomato seems to be attempting to make up for this though. I counted today and there are at least 45 tomatoes on the plant and I may have missed some. The celebrity only has three on it but it is making blooms on its new growth and the three it has are pretty substantial.

All of the squash plants have been blooming this week. Unfortunately it seems they’re all producing male flowers right now so I’m not actually getting any squash out of it and also the storms we’ve had for the last two days have knocked many of the blossoms off. I collected between 10 and 15 from the ground this afternoon.

Last week I thinned the edamame and green beans. Since several green bean plants didn’t come up I just transplanted healthy plants into the empty locations and I ended up making a second row of edamame out of plants collected from the original row. Several of the edamame plants look like they’re going to start blooming and the green beans are not far behind them.

I haven’t thinned any of the other plants yet and I probably won’t until they actually start crowding each other. The only ones that seem to be crowded at all right now are one hill of cucumber vines. I will probably take the two weakest plants from that hill next week.

The flower beds in the front yard are doing their best to keep up with the garden. The new ground cover roses Mom gave me this year are all blooming right now. The red roses, purple butterfly bush and sage, yellow lantana and pink petunias are really nice. This is the best this bed has looked since it was created. Very nice.

All of the day lilies are getting ready to bloom too. The yellow one in front of the house has been blooming all week and the orange one in the back has a bunch of flower stems on it. The pink cone flower in the back also looks good though I wasn’t able to get a decent picture of them.

It’s been a month and two days since the garden was planted. How is it doing? Things are alive! I don’t have much to say about it other than that. See for yourself.

Another month and a half or so and it will be snack time.

It’s been a busy day around the house today. I found the touch up paint that was provided with my house and went around cleaning up all the little scuffs and marks the walls have accumulated over the years. I also painted the recessed ceiling in the front entry way. I think some nice small mouldings would look good up in there too so I’m going to visit the Despot later and see what they have. I recovered my UT electronic ID so I could apply for a job there. Did a little work on the book shelves too though I only have one new piece cut to show for it. It is irritating when the table saw is too small to handle things. Being creative and improvising are fun but sometimes you just want to cut a corner off a piece of plywood and go about your day instead of jumping through a bunch of hoops. Oh well.

The big news today is that there are little growing things in the garden. I have four cucumber plants, three yellow squash plants, one acorn squash plant and something like ten corn plants that have all pushed their way up to smile at the sun. There’s also something growing near the edamame but it remains to be seen if that’s beans or weeds.

yellow squash

cucumber

corn

Also the flowers are pretty. Here are pretty flowers.

The garden is finished and planted. I didn’t get any potatoes or sweet potatoes planted because it is a bit late in the year for that and I didn’t see any “seed potatoes” at any of the nurseries I visted. I do have cucumbers, yellow summer squash, acorn squash, onions (so many more than I could ever eat even if I liked them), tomatoes, green beans, corn, basil, edamame and some strawberries in a pot. Apparently I got started a little late on the planting but it’ll be ok. Here’s a picture.