the bottle gourd plants are making a valiant push to produce as many gourds as possible. once august is over, we may need to remove any new gourds in order to channel all the remaining energy into the preexisting gourds. the bottle gourds have the classic chinese "hulu" figure-eight shape. elsewhere, despite having 3 butternut squash plants, we've only managed to grow just 3 squashes. it's now a race against time to get all the gourds and squashes to maturity before the ever expanding powdery mildew kill off all the leaves.

elsewhere in the garden, i'm finally seeing some red tomatoes (it's almost september!). there'd been some earlier but my father told me he'd already picked them off. one of the gladioli have finally bloomed as well, some showy non-fragrant yellow flowers. the mints and the chinese chives have all bloomed as well, their flowers attracting an army of honeybees. so am i to assume the massive honeybee die-off of last year is not a concern anymore? or maybe someone nearby has a beehive. there are also some big ears of corn and it looks to be a good corn year, despite it being our first time growing them. my only concern is that the big ears are the ones that i hand-pollinated, but they were also the first ones to grow out their silks, so many the smaller ears just need a few more days to catch up.

dinner featured some items straight from the garden, the basil and tomatoes. the dragon fruit on the other hand was a splurge purchase from my sister's recent trip to chinatown.

after dinner the whole family piled outside in the backyard to check out the flowering bottle gourds. there must've been over 2 dozen white blossoms. how many will be pollinated is hard to say since it rained earlier in the evening.

my roommate didn't come back from new york until 10:00. his friend turned out to be living on long island, so they had to take a shuttle to flushing then a commuter train in order to get home. he did some sightseeing on saturday and spent sunday on a outlet mall shopping spree.