Gardening, and etc
I am currently giving a salt bath to my garden's first head of broccoli--even though it doesn't appear that we've actually got the cabbage loopers that you're supposed to be killing with the salt bath. Better safe than terrifying the kid with one of the veggies he subsists on.
I took a picture of the garden yesterday, to show exactly how the pumpkins have decided to take over. This is much more success than I ever had with pumpkins as a kid. Which is probably why I underestimated them. Also these are sugar pumpkins, not jack-o-lantern pumpkins, perhaps that makes a difference. In that mass of vines, there are two about half-grown pumpkins I know about. Since I think that as a kid I always had problems with the pumpkins actually getting fertilized to grow (why do the male and female flowers grow about six feet away from one another?) I've also been keeping an eye out for the female flowers and making sure some pollen gets over to them.
My tomato plants, which are in the side garden, are not doing anywhere as well as they did last year. Which means I'm not going to have 4 plants put out 600 tomatoes ;) I'm still not sure how 4 roma plants put out 600 tomatoes last year, but they also got to about six feet tall (when I stood them up and measured them, since they'd collapsed their cages and were sprawling all over the ground). The romas are only about 2-3 feet tall this year, and already well into tomato production. Oh, well.
I took a picture of the garden yesterday, to show exactly how the pumpkins have decided to take over. This is much more success than I ever had with pumpkins as a kid. Which is probably why I underestimated them. Also these are sugar pumpkins, not jack-o-lantern pumpkins, perhaps that makes a difference. In that mass of vines, there are two about half-grown pumpkins I know about. Since I think that as a kid I always had problems with the pumpkins actually getting fertilized to grow (why do the male and female flowers grow about six feet away from one another?) I've also been keeping an eye out for the female flowers and making sure some pollen gets over to them.
My tomato plants, which are in the side garden, are not doing anywhere as well as they did last year. Which means I'm not going to have 4 plants put out 600 tomatoes ;) I'm still not sure how 4 roma plants put out 600 tomatoes last year, but they also got to about six feet tall (when I stood them up and measured them, since they'd collapsed their cages and were sprawling all over the ground). The romas are only about 2-3 feet tall this year, and already well into tomato production. Oh, well.