Ew, SLUGS

[voxwoman]

They are small grey ones, not the scary gigantic leopard slugs, but I guess with all the rain that's been happening here it was inevitable. I had to boot one or 2 off of almost all the squash I harvested today.

Speaking of squash, the green squash (zucchini) tripled in size in about 4 days. My plans of harvesting them when they were reasonable are gone. I have well over 10 pounds of squash in the kitchen right now. I'm not sure what to do with all of it. I'm not a big fan of zucchini bread. And there are dozens more on the way. Maybe I'll try to can some of these. Or give them to my neighbors.

The strawberries seem to be done for the year. Considering that it's July, I think we got an excellent harvest - we were eating them out of the garden for well over 1 month. Next year, the early ones should be there. I don't think the plants can bear that early when you first plant them in late March.

The more mature blueberry bush will be ready to pick in a matter of days or weeks. The other bushes (one died) have established themselves to the point where I expect berries next year.

We also have string beans to harvest, but I'm letting them mature on the vine this time, since we're in squash mode at the moment.

There will be photos tomorrow of all sorts of things, as I've been promising. I have almost used up my free space on Flickr, and, being the cheap bastard that I am, I'm uploading this batch of pictures to photobucket, where I just made an account.

in other news, I've discovered what AJAX is... it's what JavaScript and DHTML have evolved into. I can handle that, I think, but I'm a bit saddened by the realization that the DHTML book I spent 40 bucks on is now obsolete. I will be reviewing all these lovely web development books as I read through them. Probably on one of the websites that I'll be tweaking over the next few months.

I found a whole  bunch of my mom's unpublished poetry for children, and some other things. I am thinking that maybe I'll put them up online, or collect them in some way and try to get them published? I'll have to think about it for a while. Certainly there's a ton of archival stuff about her books that needs to be scanned and uploaded to the Internet...
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Comments

Zucchini

[nolawitch.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid, my mother and every other gardener in the Podunk town where I grew up planted far too many zucchini plants. Most of the people were older and remembered well the Depression so they could not bring themselves to waste food. Rather than throw out the obviously excess zucchini, they would wait until a neighbor would leave and then place a bushel basket of zucchini on the front porch or by the back door. People would come home to find too damned many zucchini for one household to eat. Some of them passed it on to friends, family and coworkers. For many years after the great zucchini wars, nobody planted much of the stuff.

Re: Zucchini

[voxwoman.livejournal.com]

I know it's a prolific plant, and I didn't plant an entire row of them, either - only half a row, but they are HUGE. The eggplant that is taking up the rest of the row are pathetic in comparison. I also harvested about 25 blossoms to fry up, besides. I'll know better next year - either don't plant more than 3 plants, or be ready to eat a LOT of blossoms!

[thenea.livejournal.com]

I found I prefer chocolate zucchini bread to plain zucchini bread. Carrot zucchini bread is also nice. I think it just works better as a mixer in bread rather than the main flavor.

[voxwoman.livejournal.com]

that's an idea. Chocolate *anything* bread would be preferable. Or just plain chocolate...

[saminz.livejournal.com]

Not sure if that link will work, but a "Snail-fence" might be the answer. People do this here, since the poison they used to put out almost got rid of all our hedgehog population...

Sorry about the German - there's a series of very useful pics, though.

[voxwoman.livejournal.com]

There are some gardens I want to emulate - the raised bed, particularly.

I also liked the turtle habitat photo :-)

Don't tell Ariel that you have hedgehogs in the wild! She's been lobbying for a pet hedgehog for a couple of years now.

[saminz.livejournal.com]

Yeah - that's indeed way cute, that turtle-house!

Hedgehogs hibernate - not sure if they would be much fun as a pet.
But they are way cute and useful to have in the wild. Eat slugs, too. We are encouraged to leave heaps of dead leaves and twigs out for them to hibernate in. Sadly, a lot of the young ones get run over each spring, but the population as a whole is doing quite well. They're not particularly tame, though. Very shy little creatures. Tell her that ;-).