Still have two of last year's butternuts left, which is double what this year's entire harvest will likely be!! Cooked one of them today, roasted, to help Scooter's digestion.
Amazing to think it's been sitting on a table for an entire year, and is perfectly fine to eat!
Wow that asparagus patch by the patio door is sooooooo completely
infested with aphids. Wonder what the long term damage will be. There
have been a few more generations of lady bugs, including some adult
beetles who I witnessed today emerge spotless from their... whatever
their previous form is called. There are also a lot of house flies who
hang around the asparagus constantly. Can't figure out if they're
eating the aphids or not.
The asparagus by the compost bin also has some starting :-(
Not doing anything about it this year, other than eventually removing the ferns later this fall.
Harvested the seeds from the two big heads on the north edge of the central bed. The flower petals were totally dry/crispy. The back of the heads were yellowish. (definitely not brown, but not green either) They were somewhat hard to remove from the head, required some force to do so. Results: I feel like it might have been a little early, maybe resulting in the seeds being a bit small (but still edible).
Roasted with the quick method and the longer method and found the result the same in both cases. Would have liked them to be saltier.
Looks like no more sunflower harvest after this, as the ones outside the yard will need to be cut soon for aesthetic reasons, and the two still in the yard snapped their stem so unlikely to mature.
Same harvest as the other two potato harvests earlier this year: 1.25 pounds.
Planted store-bought fridge sprouted potatoes, close to the top of the pot rather than lower down.
Up until last week or so, I was still applying water / white vinegar / oil mixture every few days and cutting off the worst leaves. Now though I've stopped, what's the point fighting it, since there's still only ONE single winter squash (the vertical butternut), new winter squashes continue dying before flowering, and 3 of the 4 remaining zucchini plants look they are never going to produce anything. There's only 1 zucchini plant I have any moderate hopes of getting anything else from; one of the rondes has some promising-looking fruit.
So anyway, yeah, I'm going to let what will be, be with the squash. (Though I'll keep monitoring the one half-decent zucchini for SVB)
Noticed recently that the tomatoes have all stopped flowering. Still ripening nicely resulting in TONS of tomatoes over the past few weeks (lots of Bolognese sauce this year), but, no new ones coming along. I assume it's because of whatever disease this is that's affecting so many things.
And for the record, they all taste the same to me! Scotia, beefsteak (which were no bigger than the others), collected seed, all tasted the same.
Oh my! The huge central sunflower fell down today. The stem snapped. Weighed the head -- 3.5 pounds. That lower part of the stem was streaked with brown on the inside, my guess is those sunflower maggot flies' babies.
The site, so alas, no harvest from this one either.
Still a few more sunflower heads from which I can hope to get a harvest.
It left quite trail of devastation, like a tree coming down. Ground cherry and squash banged up, but, likely will be fine (not that I'm getting anything out of those central squashes anyway!).
