#squash!

[strangerstarsandlands]

the best place to be is in the kitchen making soup

[edenfalling]

Gardening update!

Today I finally had a day off when the weather was both a) warm and b) dry. (It has been SUCH a chilly, damp week here in Ithaca. We had hail on Tuesday and snow on Thursday, which is frankly a bit much.) So I finished my first round of weeding, tidied the raspberry canes a little, and planted a bunch of squash seeds.

I also took my container garden outdoors for the afternoon, which for weather-related reasons I was unable to do all this past week. They are enjoying the sun and fresh air, and if the weather forecasts are accurate, I should be able to take them out (possibly for keeps!) starting on Tuesday.

Oh, and the photo of a green stake in bare dirt? That’s a marker for the squash, because otherwise I’d never remember what was where. I put one down next to each seed deposit, for a total of... I think seven planting sites? We’ll see how many of them sprout.

(My goal is to have the squash cover the entire ground surface of the garden patch so I won’t have to worry about weeding because they’ll just shade out anything that tries to sprout. Except the raspberries, probably, because raspberries are nearly as tenacious as mint.)

[boiling-paint]

Aight I need to make this post to remind myself to tag my frequent mutuals lmfao if I reblog somethin from u or answer somethin and it's not tagged w ur tag pls lemme know I'd like to form this habit!

@eelzawa (idk why but tagging u doesnt work) : thank you kadar/thank you axe

@lesbian-roddy : o-kay! (haha get it--)

@squibble-squib : squash!

@weird-squish-cube : squish!

this list will grow as I grow in touch w more of my mutuals qksjsk I'm now realizing I dont talk to many of you anymore! that should change.

[edenfalling]

Gardening update, part 3!

Observe my lovely squash. :) Squash B and F are the ones that survived the late frost, and squash G has one seed that kinda-sorta-technically survived the frost by dint of being super lazy and sprouting five days behind schedule. *eyes it suspiciously* All the others were planted after the frost. And no, I don’t know why the squash A seedlings are so obviously running behind the others. Maybe it’s just not a good patch of soil?

I mean, actually, that’s probably part of the reason. Squashes C, D, E, F, and G are all growing in soil that’s been supplemented by several years of me tossing old potting soil off the porch when I kill some/all of my peppers in the late autumn or early winter. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten any of that dirt as far out as the locations of squash A or B.

The natural soil of my neighborhood is a little iffy, since a lot of it is 19th century industrial landfill. The whole area used to be varying degrees of marsh as Fall Creek hit the valley floor and merged into Cayuga Lake, but it got filled in for houses and shops and such, and a lot of what they used for fill was... well, dig down a few feet and you start running into distressingly grayish muck, is all I’m saying. And they’ve done three soil remediation projects on the Ithaca Falls park and still haven’t gotten all the lead and whatnot out of there. (Thanks, Ithaca Gun factory! *headdesk*)

...

But anyway, aren’t my squash cute? :)

[edenfalling]

Look, flowers! And a baby eggplant fruit!

Aren't plants the coolest? :D

[edenfalling]

Gardening update!

In the first photo, you can see my bell peppers, two planters of carrots, one eggplant (in the blue pot near the back), and four pots where jalapenos will eventually sprout. The left carrot planter used to have two volunteer onions, but they did not deal well with being stuck inside since late winter and died. It also keeps getting dug up by local animals (squirrels? cats? raccoons?) so I have started protecting it with a screen that fell out of my upstairs neighbors’ window and which they haven’t yet come to retrieve. Hopefully this will let my third round of carrot seeds sprout successfully, argh.

In the second photo, the left planter contains a whole bunch of spinach seedlings. The right planter contains two outer rows of rainbow chard left over from last year, and a central row of spinach because I had so many spinach seeds. I will thin them sometime in this coming week.

The third photo shows the raspberries exuberantly growing up the trellises, and also in random places where I cannot readily get them to lean on the trellises, because raspberries believe in no authority but the iron fist of winter.

The fourth photo shows my baby squash! A few of my initial round of seeds did survive the three days of late frost, but I have also planted a second round of seeds which are now sprouting. Here you can see a first round survivor growing its third true leaf, and a second round sprout showing two lovely cotyledons.

And that’s about it for my garden. In another week or two, I may take photos of Downstairs Neighbor S’s front porch herb planters and her small vegetable plot in the part of our front yard that Landlord Dude used to keep as a “wild” environment, but which turned into a hideous mess after the city chopped down the giant maple that formerly graced our street corner. I am not at all sorry we no longer have a fresh source of infinite baby maples every year (maples are WEEDS and the bane of hedges!) but it does mean we have to pay more attention to the yard lest we be overrun by goodness knows what. Frankly, I will take sunflowers and tomatoes and scallions over the invasive spiderwort we had a couple years ago.

[edenfalling]

Slightly belated gardening update, part 1:

So, the squash! They are doing fairly well, I think? I've never grown them in the actual ground before, so I don't know whether the speckles on their cotyledons are a bad sign or just something that happens when they get rained on and random ground crud splashes upwards. *shrug* I guess we'll see.

I did thin them on Tuesday, so you will see three fewer plants in all subsequent updates.

[edenfalling]

It's been a while since I posted gardening updates, hasn't it? Whoops.

Anyway, these photos are from Sunday so there have been some developments since then, but whatever.

First, the raspberries. The canes are growing like mad, and there are so many berries in various stages of development. I suspect at least 50% of them will be lost to birds and squirrels and such, but that's still a respectable number of berries remaining for me. This second crop of the summer is going to be vastly larger than the first round.

Second, the squash. As you can see, I did thin them some weeks ago. As of Sunday, one of them had gotten too top-heavy and tipped sideways (probably not coincidentally, that was the first to bloom), but as of today three others have joined it in sideways majesty (and also early stages of blooming). So I think I'm going to get a decent number of squash out of this year despite starting far too late in the season.