i packed up my things and left for belmont via motorcycle. my father and i spent the rest of the morning touring the backyard. he told me one of the hops bines has died, the tendril must've gotten kinked during transport. the bottom part of the bine is still alive and will probably produce a new tendril, so we're not too worried. he did have a hyacinth bean wrapped around the hops trellis until i told him it was better if the bean had its own trellis otherwise it'll just take over the hops. so he made a teepee trellis using some bamboo poles, and managed to wrap some long beans onto the new trellis as well.
while inspecting our squashes, we each managed to kill an adult squash vine borer. i smashed one into the ground where it promptly disappeared, until i finally found it. because they're moths, they quickly lose their colorful scales when handled. my father managed to slap one to death when it landed on a squash leaf.
i went back inside for lunch - some taiwanese pastry my 2nd aunt had bought from chinatown, along with some cherries and figs.
as it was hot outside, i stayed indoors until later in the afternoon when the sky became overcast and the temperature seemed to have cooled down. i mixed up 0.8 gallons of immunox solution (with 2 tbsp of concentrated immunox) and sprayed the grapevines. this was the 5th and last application. if immunox really works, i shouldn't be seeing any black rot infections. otherwise it's back to the drawing board. one problem i see is we didn't prune the grapes early in the season. next season, we'll cut everything back so it's just the main trunks and a few main vines. there were plenty of concord grapes, but it's like this every year: at first everything seems healthy, but as the summer progresses, developing grapes will turn black until they're all infected and we're left with no grapes. this is my first year using artificial fungicide (immunox), so it's still a work-in-progress.
while spraying the grapes, i saw a large jumping spider with a squash vine borer moth in its jaws. so that's 3 dead SVB's today! i tried to spray around the spider and its meal but still managed to get some immunox on them. the spider must not like the smell of immunox because it later abandoned the moth.
we also made some more cuttings. we made one from a gardenia and more than half a dozen pots of belle of india jasmines. speaking of jasmines, they really seem to love this hot and sunny weather, because each plant is producing a flourish of flower buds, from the regular jasmines to the belle of india variety.
my mother was out in the living room for a change, knitting in the lafuma zero gravity chair, watching the final season of bosch on amazon prime. as evening approached she made dinner. she made just enough dishes that we finished everything without leftovers, a rarity. i returned home soon afterwards, get ready to watch the NBA western conference finals.
tonight was game 4 between the suns-clippers. los angeles was looking to even the series at 2-2, while phoenix was hoping to go up 3-1. the suns had a great first half, i wasn't paying attention, but every time i checked the tv, phoenix seemed to be up even more points, at one point ahead by 16. in the second half however it was like somebody flipped a switch: suns was missing all their shots while the clippers were making all of theirs. the 4th quarter was insane. both teams couldn't score. it was like somebody had cursed the basketball hoops because the ball would go in then spin right out. but the suns managed to eke out a few more points, riding on the back of chris paul, especially when devin booker fouled out the game. suns won, 84-80, a very low scoring game, which is a testament to the defensive battle that had taken place.