I love Sundays. Most of them are beautiful. Today was no exception. Duane has been pretty sick with the flu this week so we took the time to stay home and rest. We listened to John MacArthur teaching on the Second Coming of Christ over at http://www.oneplace.com/ and he helped me get the garden watered well.
I am thrilled to see the muskmelon are finally producing. They have overrun their space and are going to overtake Brandies dog yard any minute now! When you have any squash family plants or viney types you can tell the female flowers from the male by the swelling just behind the blossom. It looks like she's pregnant! If it is pollinated it will become fruit, but if not, it will wither and fall off. You can assure pollination by doing it for yourself. Just take a small artist's brush and take some of the pollen from the stamens of the male flowers (those are the little stalks sticking out of the middle of the flower) and then depositing the pollen you have collected onto the stamens of a female flower. But we have so many bees around here (it really is amazing) and wasps that we can see them buzzing around continually during the day by the hundreds just above the plants.
The above photo is the muskmelon patch. We put up "ladders" and attached chicken fence on both sides so the melons would have a way to climb. We were hoping to save some space that way. The picture is actually a little over a week old and the plants are up and over the top of the ladders and in -between them and through the fence surrounding the whole thing! It is an 8x8 patch of mostly sand. I think we have 4 plants on each side but I can't remember and there's no telling now. I wanted to use knee highs to tie up the fruit for support but we have lost the battle with the overflow that has entangled itself in the fence. Awww, too bad--NOT! This muskmelon is called Swan Lake. The picture looked so refreshing and beautiful I had to try it. We bought the seed from Seeds of Change out of New Mexico. http://www.seedsofchange.com/
The little plant in front of the chain link fence is actually 4 gherkins in a 3 gallon pot. They are growing nicely along the fence now. They went in late but I have already had one and there is now an abundance of flowers. The leaves are showing a sign that the plant is in need of magnesium. The veins on some leaves are very green and stand out while the rest of the leaf has a yellow tone to them. I put on a good organic fertilizer today and hope that will do the trick. I wish my compost was finished so I could use that but it will be a couple of weeks yet. Then I will screen it and put into the new pile the larger unfinished stuff.
OK. I tried to put the top picture just above this paragraph but it didn't work. I've got a lot to learn. Sigh That picture was taken from the roof of half of the backyard. Actually, at the back of the yard are 3 apple trees and a pear tree that you can't see. They are loaded this year. God has given us an abundance! There is a banana tree to the west of the patio. It now has 8 leaves. It is a dwarf canvendish. I am hoping it will flower and produce for us. It has three babies at the bottom we need to remove and transplant. And you can see the blue barrel at the edge of the house. We actually have a water catchment system. Duane is able to get these food grade barrels from work. Then he has put good size brass spigots on them and connected six of them around the back of the house at different points. That way we don't have to keep unhooking the hose when one is empty. They drain into the last one on the chain. Or we can use them individually if we don't want to drag the hose around one side of the house to the other. He set one barrel on top of another at the front of the house also. They look like a nice splash of color against the light blue of the house.
You can even see my clothesline that runs diagonally in the back right corner of the dog yard. It is a godsend in these times when gas is so expensive. I love a good clothesline!
