Thwarted Again

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.