Big garden - nasturtiums, mesclun, iris, artichokes, squashes
On Wednesday my intern was here and we tackled the Big garden. We started at the south end and worked north, weeding, pruning, deadheading, and harvesting.
Big garden - kabocha squash, summer squash, empty pea fence, iris, veronica, cleome
We made it to the pea fence and got that cleaned off. That made nearly ⅓ of the garden done.
Big garden - artichokes, cleome, lamium, lovage, veronica, geranium, horehound, iris, squashes
We didn’t deadhead the cleome, it was just more than either of us wanted to undertake. I had hoped to do it on Thursday, along with more work in this garden.
Four of the 9 Kabocha squashes left on the plant had ripened so I picked them. This is the Sunshine variety.
The harvest on Wednesday
We took about 14 too old summer squash off the vines and found lots of small squash coming along. We divided up the old squash between the pullets and layers. These old squash have to be stomped open as the rind is too hard for the birds to break through.
The layers also got 2 totes full of buggy greenery from the garden work. They love this!
Some of the artichokes had gotten too old so I left them to flower. They are so pretty.
The Walla Walla onions on the far eastern side of the rows had reached a decent size.
In my meanders for photos I raided the Anne raspberries and noticed this pumpkin hanging from the top of the compost bin is ripening. There was another on the ground that I picked as its stem was severed. There’s 2 more that might ripen also. Because it was a plant in the compost, my helper friend did not give it the milk spray and you can see the mildew is rampant.
I’d noticed when I’d gone out after supper that the sun was flaming red/orange. And my husband had told me that the cloudiness was not clouds but the smoke from the western US fires that had made it across.
It made everything even 500’ away hazy.
source
So I went online to see how bad it was. They consider the quality “good” here in Mass, but after 15 mins outside after supper, my lungs disagreed. We had started to actually smell the smoke off and on.
Looks like Thursday and possibly Friday will be inside days, doing something sedentary like loading dehydrators. I could probably try to work in my respirator outside, but it makes me lightheaded from oxygen deprivation after a couple hours. It’s probably smarter to stay inside until the rain and cold front move the smoke out on Friday.