Butternut Squash grew on its own!

Early this summer Meg planted 4 hills of yellow squash in the garden. Shortly after planting we had some good rains and the seeds that came up on two of the hills were slightly off the hills. So only 4 plants came up in 4 hills, yet 3-4 seeds were planted in each hill, these were old seeds.

It did not take long to realize we had 2 hills of yellow squash (so far about 8 beautiful squash harvested), a pickling cucumber seeded from last year (4 cukes harvested) and until last week a mystery plant we assumed was a pumpkin. Now were have the answer to the mystery plant it's a Butternut Squash and it currently has 5 squashes on the rapidly spreading vines. No we have never planted Butternuts ever, this must have came from our compost as we do eat them.

 Here is one of the week old butternut squashes in the garden, it is about 6 inches long right now! Below is a male butternut squash flower (6 inches diameter), note there are 3 bumble bees buried inside the flower, I see this in about every squash flower we have.

 This is Manny, that is what we named him. I do call him Manfred where he is bad, maybe most of the time then. He's a Flame Point Siamese cat. Still our female cat Valentine is not warmed up to him yet. She was on the top of my couch while he was on the couch seat the other night. Today Manny was chasing centipedes which are pretty numberous these days in the garden.

 This is Manny chilling out on his favorite chair in the screened porch just before he rolled off the chair. Silly cat....

 The biggest sweet pepper we have ever grown, it measures 10 1/4 inches! Not eaten it yet so I don't know how it tastes. We are finally getting tomatoes, lots of yellow squash,  several Anaheim peppers and a few pickling cukes. The Armenian Yard Long Cucumbers have had lots of male flowers, but no fruit yet. Found another stray cucumber plant in one of the compost bins flowering yesterday.

We decided to cut back on expenses around here, so far we saved $103 a month. I cancelled the land phone which barely worked ($40 a month), Dish Network ($55 a month) and Netflix DVDs ($8 a month). Invested in a big DTV  TV antenna and I'm in the process of installing it, anyone want to crawl under the house to hook up the wires? So as a test I moved the TV into the guest bedroom and brought in the antenna wire and picked up 32 channels. We are 15 miles north of Durham and most of the channels are at least 40-50 miles away.

 These dishes are still on our roof, we do not use either of them anymore, soon to be metal scrap. To think we were paying $125 a month for these. Now we have broad band coming in on out phone line for $40 a month unlimited, Wild Blue was $70 a month and limited, no watching netflix online with it, we'd go over limit. So now we pay $8 a month to stream movies.

 This is our new DTV antenna it's a C490 from Antennacraft I picked up at Radio Shack. Funny the girl that waited on me turns out she was one of Meg's former students grown up. As you can see were are under heavy tree cover, still picked up 32 channels. Not all the channels are usable, the piece of garbage inside antenna picked up 3-5 channels only one was full time. So I'm convinced these antennas do work. Offering again anyone want to crawl under the house and pull the wires?

As you can see the new DTV antenna is not such an eye sore and it is at the back of the house not above the walkway to the house.

New Top Feeder and garden frame

Finally I picked up a top feeder for the bee hive, it holds 2.5 gallons of syrup.As you can see I stained it the same green as our house.

Here are the first bees to discover it, took only a few minutes.

I went to the food co op in Hillsborough and came back to find we had rain while I was gone maybe a 1/4 inch. Doppler showed a tiny band pasting right over us just before I got home. No rain seen elsewhere so for once we got lucky. 30% chance today for rain.

Two hours later the bees found the feeder. I took the top off the hive without smoking them or wearing protective gear either. I felt somewhat comfortable without the gear a few bees did harass me, but no stings. See our pond it looks pretty empty, maybe 25 foot in diameter right now.

Here is the 'new' garden frame made out of recycled 2 x 6s I took from a 10 year old deck this spring. I also cut 8- 2 x 3s x 18 inches to screw onto the sides later and mount 4 - 1/2 inch PVC pipes to to make a taller hoop frame later. If the acorns start to drop it'll go on sooner.

 We'll be planting carrots, kale, lettuce and maybe radishes in there soon. I ordered some Rainbow Blend carrot seeds, Lacinato Kale seeds and Gourmet Mix Lettuce Seeds last night while looking for Armenian Yard-Long Cucumber Seeds which I ordered as well. I tasted the Armenian Yard-long cucumber yesterday(about 14 inches long and 3 inches wide) at the farmers market and just had to grow my own.

The tomato plant at top right above the frame is a Rainbow Tomato, only picked 2 big tomatoes from it so far, it was our worst performer in the tomato realm.

Here you can see Jubilee in the front left, nearly dying, it still has a few small orange tomatoes, did pretty well. The A frame in the center of the garden has a 12 foot tall Cherokee Purple, it is still flowering, did great this year. The cucumber trellis on the right has given us maybe 50 - 8 inch cucumbers this year, the best year we have had with cucumbers.

Tomatoes are about done, we picked maybe 40 pounds of them. I made spaghetti sauce in 3 huge batches and froze what we could not eat right away.

 Almost forgot we finally have Patty Pan Squash, these seeds are at least 2 years old. Just two squash as you can see above and below. Can't buy these tasty squash is the super market. Thank you bees for the pollinating job and giving us squash!

Wet Weather We'll See!

I'm getting pretty sick of being a slave to the water hose and watering can. Since June we have missed about every strom that has came up. This morning I was reading the Carolina Butterfly Society newsletter and a member in Raleigh was whining about the drought there. In the past few weeks every big storm that has came by dumped some good rains on Raleigh(hope his article was at least dated) and missed us entirely. This morning more rains passed through Raleigh and we got drops on the rain chains. Yesterday Charlotte (2.5 hours from here) got 6 inches in two hours, flooding in fact, we got nothing.

The heat, yesterday was reported to have a high of 88, first day in the 80s I can recall in sometime. Every week the forecast never drops below the 90s, we might be breaking an all time record for days in triple digits this year, we are very close. The news reported Raleigh(1 hour from here) has broken the record for 100+ degree days in a year and said that the hottest years in recorded history 5 of them have been in the last 10 years, due to all the concrete and buildings there.

On to brighter news I started the beehive because last year we did not get one squash in the garden. Today I found over a dozen blooms on the summer squash that got planted late. I think it is 3 year old pattypan squash seeds, Meg planted it under the pea trellis with Kentucky Wonder beans which are doing great too. This 7 foot trellis I have been hand watering 5 gallons a day from the rain tote under the deck. I believe the upper rain tote is empty or very close to empty. Hoping the rain today will fill the rain totes back up, we can store 600 gallons of water in them combined.

Pattypan Squash, we hope to find out. Pattypans are my favorite squash!

here is our pond, drying up pretty fast, the brown you see is mud. The water lilies are out of control, bad mistake to put them in the pond, we do see hundreds of flowers at times, this morning I noted 2 flowers under very overcast skies.

This blog is approaching 300 posts and 4000 comments (only 13 away from 4000). We made a milestone recently my garden art post from 2009 hit 2000 visits and installing rain chains made the top 10 all time posts, first post to reach that goal in the same year let alone month!

Currently Doppler Radar shows rains directly to the south of us, we might get some of this rain. Here is a link to the local doppler map, we are at the top center of the map.