Trellis Down! Trellis Down!

Two-week-old Athena that lost its connection to the sugar pumps. 

A brief rain (0.06 inches) was the straw the broke the bamboo trellis's back. That and three ripening melons hanging from the very top, and... SNAP! 

Spent the morning carefully cutting the string and bamboo trellis out of the vines, and laying the vines back out as close to righted as possible. Melons don't find the sun much, so we have to get them so it's just a quick leaf adjustment on the plant's part, or they won't be facing the light.

Then I'll have to construct some network of small mirrors and wires that gets the sunlight to the down-turned leaf faces, and that will be expensive. (Just kidding, I think...) 

A Lorn Melon

A lorn melon

Planted

A creeping yellowing warmth

The Sun

Mother

Tendrils pulling, tips explode

I Grow

The bud

Unswollen promise of full

Sweet Girl

The rat

Tearing furrows of my flesh

I Weep

Am found

Peered into, decided, done.

Compost

Root Veggies Suck | Lettuce Seedlings | The Melon Race

I gave up on my root veggies in rows, again. For some reason, turnips and radishes have a nasty habits of throwing all the dirt off of their roots and not developing anything but top growth for me. 

So I dug up and saved the two-week old lettuces and potted them in cups. I'll let them get up to a month and then put them back out after they will make good transplants. The Parris Island Cos will probably be ready to set out at the same time. 

Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce about two weeks old

The winner for this second melon season will probably be this Athena, pictured in the previous post, and now a week or so riper in this photo. It's putting on a pretty beige-yellow net, and starting to smell wonderful.

Athena from previous entry, now a week older and developing netting.

However, coming in close second is this Ambrosia melon, which is probably a week or 10 days out, and making my mouth water already.

The legendary Ambrosia muskmelon basking in 105 degrees. 

 Just meters away in third place is another Ambrosia (so affluent was the farmer Foppl!).

Ambrosia ripener #2 soon to be eaten. 

For a true description of the glory of the Ambrosia, and someone more obsessed with melons than I, check out Wayne Schmidt's Extreme Melon Growing page.

In all likelihood, any three of the twenty Early Silver Lines will ripen any time now, but due to size and the sheer quantity that would have to be monitored, are excluded from this particular race. 

Two more Athena in the same patch as the topmost, 10 days from picking. 

...and just in case we get hungry, there are two more four-pounders in the front 10 days from the pickins. 

So affluent. The farmer. 


Foppl. 

Obsession?

I was concerned that my largest Athena was weighing down the entire front yard trellis, and was probably going to slip 3 weeks from ripeness if the tensile pressure on the stem was not relieved. Thus, small plastic pot and baby blanket, two tent stakes to anchor said pot in place. The trellis stopped contorting 45 degrees out of true, and the stem relaxed nicely with no stress - tensile or shear. Hopefully no damage was done and it will slip normally. I say it's got another 1 1/2 weeks. 

All three of the large (1 1/2 week) ripeners on this plant recently developed very heavy ribbing. I was concerned that they might split, but it looks like they're good. 

Left to right: Squash Fail, Squash Win

Here's our son Joseph with the his recent pickings. He left the big one for me to clip, but he picked the baby one yesterday and sheepishly pointed it out while harvesting the larger fruit this morning. I guess he figured if he set it gently back onto the vine part it might get bigger anyway. 

He's cute.

Cos Seedlings. Bananas and Pineapples? (and where are my Pepino?)

Parris Island Cos Seedlings

If these weren't Cos, they would be suffering in rows with the Black Seeded Simpson.

However. Since they are, here they is in 3" pots with seed starting mixture. Yes, I pulled and potted up the damn lettuce seedlings.

Well, they weren't doing well, that's why.

I hope these start to grow a lot larger than they, and a lot faster than they have been. I don't know if it's possible to just make plants grow slower by bad or mistaken culivation techniques - maybe it's the heat.

On another note, I was looking for pre-stratified berry seeds on Amazon and came across some dwarf banana and pineapple plants. I think those would just frusrate me, like having one pepper plant. I mean, it's a dwarf - so how many pineapple is it really going to put off? Plus, it's a large fruit, which probably means that it takes like three months to ripen one of them. Store-bought pineapple can't be that bad.

Speaking of tropical fruit, I planted like twenty Pepino seeds and I haven't seen hide or hair of them. They arrived very small and dry and almost flaky. I knew I should have asked for my money back. I think they were at the bottom of the barrel. I'll withhold the vendor's name until I see if they will remedy the situation - same guy I got all my melon seeds from, and they germinated 100% (or better!).

:)

Melon Varieties

Recently transplanted Ha Ogen Honey galia melons.

Here's a list of the varietals of melons I am growing this year, in no particular order:

Ha Ogen Honey (Galia)
Collective Farm Woman (Muskmelon)

Creme de la Creme (Muskmelon)
Honey Girl (Charentais Canteloupe)
Jenny Lind (Green Muskmelon)
Early Silver Line (Oriental)
Ambrosia (Muskmelon)
Prescott Ford Mont Blanc (Canteloupe)
Snow Mass (Honeydew)
Amy (Persian)
Dove (Galia)
Lambkin (Piel del Sapo)
Athena (Muskmelon)
Orange Cream (Orange-Flesh Watermelon)
Crimson Sweet (Red-Flesh Watermelon)
Yellow Doll (Yellow-Flesh Watermelon)

The very same Athena muskmelon (from 'Melon Babies' post) about a week later.

Growing Kellogs

No, I did not seed my Frosted Flakes.

Trust me, it won't work.

However, these little individual cereal thingies make ideal starting pots for those seedlings that have to be pulled and potted up, like tomatoes and eggplants and peppers. (Oh my).

Left front (plugs) is White Star Hybrid eggplant seedlings. Front right (Cheerios) will be Fresno Sweet peppers (provided the seeds come anything close to true). The remaining (Frosted Flakes) are actually Tarpan and Sarian strawberries.


Yes, I'm growing strawberries from seed, buying plants just seems so much like cheating, and the Quinault that we planted this year and have runners from is totally useless (don't plant it).

Melon Babies

I love melons. Really, almost anything that starts with Curcubita, because I don't like Watermelons so much. One of the Athena muskmelons that I direct-seeded as an experiment have three large ripening fruits. This is a picture of one of them about three days after pollenation, I'm guessing.

Burpee's Early Silver Line Melon

 The Early Silver Line that I started first under lights have at least six melons of this size or larger. I guess they really mean 'early'.

Two ripening Early Silver Line melons in the patch.

It's supposed to be an Oriental type (no, not Asian - Oriental). These grow crazy fast as soon as they have roots and the little nodes root to the ground. It's delicious groundcover.

Peppers

Bell Pepper (from seed, approx 2.5 mos old)

Our bell pepper plants produced several wondrous fruits, and then two that had rotten-thin walls on one side, and then one that was very small. They all ripened to chocolate and then full bright red without issue, and tasted fine.

We recently transplanted all of our container peppers, all of the bells from the seedling area, and three rows of eggplants (black and white cultivars) to a new half-raised bed. Pics of that coming as soon as I can find the USB cable for the cam.

So far, we've had Costa Rican Sweet, our 'generic' Habanero, Fresno Sweet, Red Bell, some seasoning peppers and tons of jalapenos. Then came the heat, and the containers stopped. The bells in the seedling area were too close together to fruit, so we dug the new bed. We expect fantastic results from the fifty peppers and thirty eggplants before frost, at which point we'll probably dig the rare ones and bring them in if they're doing well and have wooded their stems completely.