t
o
n
y
a
n
g
'
s
 
w
e
b
l
o
g


i went down to the community garden this morning to check on the status of my bitter melon. the slightly cracked orange one from yesterday had now completely burst. the sky was overcast and it rained briefly, though just drops. while i was there a spanish mother and daughter came by. i taught them about bitter melons and gave them some info about the community garden. while they went to explore the other plots, i took some photos, harvested the orange melon, and returned home. somebody had thrown out some yarn and a trio of glass square bowls which i picked up and brought home.

heading to belmont via motorcycle, i stopped by speedway first to fill up my tank. when i arrived at my parents' place, my father was grilling some more steaks on the stovetop with some caramelized onion.

my father left for the airport in the afternoon to pick up the astrophysicist couple.

i did another round of foliar treatment on all our plants. i used miracle-gro flower food this time (15-30-15), hoping to boost flower production to squeeze out some more harvest as the season winds down. i made a 1-1/2 gallon solution. i also sprayed the morning glory and moonflowers, which have yet to flower. i climbed a ladder to prune back some of the tendrils and i did see some moonflower buds though, but maybe this foliar treatment will help.

while inspecting the plants, i saw another orange bitter melon, the third i've seen that both my parents have failed to find. this one was growing on top of the trellis and a very large, probably one of the largest if it hadn't burst.

for posterity, i documented all the various different garden beds in my parents' backyard. i used my fuji 3D camera to really capture the different depths. it's hard to remember gardens from seasons past, but i feel like this is our most successful outing, with the squashes, bitter melons, beans, hyacinth beans, and a successful garlic harvest. bacterial wilt killed most of the cucumbers and the tomatoes are now slowly succumbing to late season blight, but the eggplants did well and we got a bounty of ground cherries. i was also successful with my flower ventures, the nigellas, the chinese asters, and the 'cherokee sunset' rudbeckias all flowering.

the flowers:

the squashes and et al.:

i weighed some of the buttercup squashes we harvested yesterday. the largest ones can be as heavy as nearly 5-1/2 lbs. this is easily our largest squash harvest yet, and there's still another half of squash we haven't collected yet because they're still growing. if we get a warm september we could extend the squash growing season and get even more squashes.

my father finally came back in the late afternoon, after dropping the couple off at the apartment. he said they had a 70 hours flight: beijing shanghai to guangzhou (10 hours layover) to hong kong (10 hours layover) to los angeles (6 hours layover) to finally boston. that's 3 days worth of traveling, i can't imagine anyone enduring that.

my father had harvested some long beans this morning, but in the afternoon my mother and i collected some more. while inspecting the backyard with my father, we collected yet another batch of long beans. from something that looked like were weren't going to get any beans to eat to now a seemingly inexhaustible supply. it took them a long time to get going, but once they did, they produced well. i heard as long as there isn't a killing frost, they can keep on producing. later in the evening we took out the long beans that'd been fermenting in my jar for the past 11 days and added new beans to the jar. we tasted the fermented long beans: sour yes, but also had a raw bean flavor, could definitely have used more time to ferment. this new jar of beans hopefully we'll leave to ferment a bit longer.

as there was nothing to eat in the house, so we ordered a pizza from domino's for pickup: sausage + mushrooms + onions. it's an easy quick meal for just $8 ($10 because we went with the XL brooklyn-style 16" option for $2 more, though it didn't taste like brooklyn-style). the pizza wasn't anything special, their only good pizza is the extravaganzza. next time we should order from armando's instead (that's a real pizza).

when i got back to cambridge, i removed the handlebar clock from my motorcycle so i could replace the battery. the clock hadn't been working all this summer, i was just too lazy to get it fixed even though i had the battery.

i took a quick shower so i'd have time to watch the end of the patriots-giants pre-season finale game. i also finished another bowl of watermelon. afterwards i carved up the other half, taking half of that to belmont tomorrow while leaving the rest for later this week.