Harvest (The Festival of Genius, 2nd of the Complementary Days, Year 226)

[neotoma]

I harvested two of the candy roaster squash today -- on was 8lb and the other was 13.5lb.

Someone stole the third one out of the garden sometime in the last week -- so I have a terrible neighbor, somewhere.

The table gold acorn squash are progressing well. I might harvest one of those soon as well.

Comments

[fyrdrakken]

There's a reason why I decided to put my edibles in containers in the backyard (I don't trust the soil in the part of the yard with the best sunlight because it killed the rosebushes that had been planted there -- I'm planning to build it up into a raised bed with fresh soil over this fall and winter, but this spring and summer I just used pots for everything) rather than in the flowerbed I haven't used yet along the south-facing side of the house. And that reason is the neighborhood kids who use our sideyards as a passthrough to get from one street to another and come and stand in our flowerbeds for whatever damned reason they see fit. I figured berries out where the kids could get to them would be likely to vanish before I could get to them. (So instead I lost a fair amount of blueberries and all the beefsteak tomatoes to birds, before I found the netting I'd bought out in the shed.)

[neotoma]

... kids trampling my garden would have me looking at what prickly plants I could grow. You've probably got the climate for naranjilla (solanum quitoense) AKA spiny bastard. Bonus is that it makes a refreshing juice, tasty pies and jams.

Or you could plant zucchini, candy roaster squash, and cassabanana -- once they got established, the area would basically be impassable. You'd need to set up climbing frames, though; the squash swarmed my iron shepherd's crook this year.

[fyrdrakken]

The big flowerbed in the front is full of roses, and the ones that have had a full two summers to settle in have grown mighty and thornaceous. (Roses love north Texas.) I'm planning on more roses in the south-facing sideyard (the part that is not within the backyard fence) but going to go slowly because then I'll have a hard time finding room for more roses (and also should work out an irrigation solution that doesn't involve carrying watering cans to one side of the house in between moving the hose from one rosebush to the next in the big front bed). So far there's one climbing Don Juan in that side bed that needed trellising before I expected it to, and the old ground cloth covering the rest of the side bed to keep the weeds out.

The kids were stepping in the small front bed, which I scattered some seed packets in and then couldn't tell weeds from flowers and it's really hard for an observer to tell how much of the plants were intentional and how much just a neglected flowerbed. Some lilies got broken, and I found little plastic beads lying in the flowerbed so I know a little girl passed through there. But then again, the neighbors' terrier also gets out periodically and a week or two ago he happily lay in that flowerbed and rolled around, so it's not just the kids. (I planted some miniature roses in that bed, which are short but fairly happy so long as I keep the grass and the dayflowers from shading them out. I need to try more lilies -- we got good results the spring before last, but this year there was fungus. Also, hopefully next spring we'll have more irises in that bed.)