Early this summer Meg planted 4 hills of yellow squash in the garden. Shortly after planting we had some good rains and the seeds that came up on two of the hills were slightly off the hills. So only 4 plants came up in 4 hills, yet 3-4 seeds were planted in each hill, these were old seeds.
It did not take long to realize we had 2 hills of yellow squash (so far about 8 beautiful squash harvested), a pickling cucumber seeded from last year (4 cukes harvested) and until last week a mystery plant we assumed was a pumpkin. Now were have the answer to the mystery plant it's a Butternut Squash and it currently has 5 squashes on the rapidly spreading vines. No we have never planted Butternuts ever, this must have came from our compost as we do eat them.
Here is one of the week old butternut squashes in the garden, it is about 6 inches long right now! Below is a male butternut squash flower (6 inches diameter), note there are 3 bumble bees buried inside the flower, I see this in about every squash flower we have.
This is Manny, that is what we named him. I do call him Manfred where he is bad, maybe most of the time then. He's a Flame Point Siamese cat. Still our female cat Valentine is not warmed up to him yet. She was on the top of my couch while he was on the couch seat the other night. Today Manny was chasing centipedes which are pretty numberous these days in the garden.
This is Manny chilling out on his favorite chair in the screened porch just before he rolled off the chair. Silly cat....
The biggest sweet pepper we have ever grown, it measures 10 1/4 inches! Not eaten it yet so I don't know how it tastes. We are finally getting tomatoes, lots of yellow squash, several Anaheim peppers and a few pickling cukes. The Armenian Yard Long Cucumbers have had lots of male flowers, but no fruit yet. Found another stray cucumber plant in one of the compost bins flowering yesterday.
We decided to cut back on expenses around here, so far we saved $103 a month. I cancelled the land phone which barely worked ($40 a month), Dish Network ($55 a month) and Netflix DVDs ($8 a month). Invested in a big DTV TV antenna and I'm in the process of installing it, anyone want to crawl under the house to hook up the wires? So as a test I moved the TV into the guest bedroom and brought in the antenna wire and picked up 32 channels. We are 15 miles north of Durham and most of the channels are at least 40-50 miles away.
These dishes are still on our roof, we do not use either of them anymore, soon to be metal scrap. To think we were paying $125 a month for these. Now we have broad band coming in on out phone line for $40 a month unlimited, Wild Blue was $70 a month and limited, no watching netflix online with it, we'd go over limit. So now we pay $8 a month to stream movies.
This is our new DTV antenna it's a C490 from Antennacraft I picked up at Radio Shack. Funny the girl that waited on me turns out she was one of Meg's former students grown up. As you can see were are under heavy tree cover, still picked up 32 channels. Not all the channels are usable, the piece of garbage inside antenna picked up 3-5 channels only one was full time. So I'm convinced these antennas do work. Offering again anyone want to crawl under the house and pull the wires?
As you can see the new DTV antenna is not such an eye sore and it is at the back of the house not above the walkway to the house.
