Miniature Pumpkins (after 5 Months)

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I harvested the miniature pumpkins from last summers’ vines back in October. There were 8 of them in all. I gave three of them to my daughter and she still has them on her kitchen counter – looking much the same as they did in October.

I put the 5 I kept in a cut glass bowl, and they have been on my kitchen table since. Two of mine have dried – shriveled. It seems that their color has changed slightly. They are not soft and don’t smell. They are even more interesting now than they were back in October!

Gleanings of the Week Ending November 18, 2023

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Are pumpkins a future superfood? – Maybe. The plants are high heat and drought tolerant….. and tolerate salinity. Nutritionally they have essential vitamins, minerals, and fats.

Do or dye: Synthetic colors in wastewater pose a threat to food chains worldwide - Dyes create several problems when they reach water systems, from stopping light reaching the microorganisms that are the bedrock of our food chains, preventing their reproduction and growth, to more direct consequences like the toxic effects on plants, soils, animals and humans. Remediation technologies for dye-containing wastewater, including chemical, biological, physical and emerging advanced membrane-based techniques.

Billions Of Snow Crabs Have Died in Alaska. Will Billions of People Be Next? – Starvation….but linked to marine heatwaves that affected snow crab metabolism.

Even treated wood prevents bacterial transmission by hand – Maybe we should be using wood more frequently for surfaces where keeping bacteria at bay is important (countertops, for example).

Staring at the Sun — close-up images from space rewrite solar science – Results from Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter…and the ground-based Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope.

Higher levels of triglycerides linked to lower risk of dementia – A correlation…not necessarily a causal relationship.

Jupiter's volcanic moon Io looks stunning in new Juno probe photos – From an October 15th flyby.

The Rio Grande isn’t just a border – it’s a river in crisis – So many rivers are in trouble. The Rio Grande drought story is complicated by international treaty…and contentious relations at the border.

These Rare Daguerreotypes Are the Earliest Surviving Photos of Iran in the 1850s – It would be interesting to see what these same places look like today.

Why are bed bugs so difficult to deal with? – They are increasingly resistant to pesticides that previously were effective. Creating policies that require reporting and resident notification by landlords…and requiring the landlords to treat infestations within 30 days has been effective in New York. Infestations can be managed, but probably not eliminated.

Pumpkins!

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My son-in-law held his annual pumpkin carving event the weekend before Halloween. My daughter doesn’t carve but she does help with buying the carload of pumpkins - one for each person in his research group (almost filling the back of the car).

This year it was raining on the evening the carving was done so the party was moved from outside into their garden room – with a big tarp on the floor to help with clean up later. The students picked the seeds out of the pumpkin guts and roasted them while they carved. The finished carvings were, as usual, spectacular. My son-in-law did the spider one which he later entered in a pumpkin carving contest at the local climbing gym and won a $50 prize!

The student that carved the Yoda pumpkin didn’t have a place to display it, so it stayed with the spider pumpkin through Halloween. A day or so after Halloween, the squirrels started eating the carved pumpkins; the first part to be eaten was one of the Yoda ears.

Meanwhile, there were two uncarved pumpkins left after the carving night. I took one to Carrollton and cooked it the Sunday before Halloween; it was so big I had to cut the top off to fit it into the oven! I made pumpkin soup (topped with pumpkin seeds that I roasted) and then pumpkin cake (made in muffin pans). The pumpkin soup was easy and yummy: pumpkin, picante, canned chicken, arugula…topped with pumpkin seeds and a sprinkle of Everything Bagel seasoning.

I still have a lot of pumpkin puree to use; most of it is in the freezer. The second pumpkin will be cooked in a few days – also will be processed and headed for the freezer. I am enjoying that we have a second refrigerator in our house to store the winter’s supply of pumpkin puree!

Zooming – October 2023

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The optics of my camera allow me to capture images that are better than I can see with my eyes – flowers, insects, birds, cave formations and seed pods that fill the frame…driftwood isolated from the noise of other things around it….sculpture, glass, and fall gourds specially arranged….sunrises and a sunset….the beauty of a fall morning. Every picture is a memory moment – a visual that also serves as a reminder of a place and mood and relationship with the people that experienced it with me. The places were mostly close to home in southwest Missouri (art museum, meadow, caverns) but also St. Louis and along the route between home and Carrollton TX.

Miniature Pumpkin Harvest

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I bought a packet of seeds for miniature pumpkins last fall and planted a couple of them in one of the flowerbeds behind my house. The one that came up first, and created a monster vine, produced 7 small ghost pumpkins! The other one came up later and only produced one yellow and orange skinned pumpkin.

I bought a packet of seeds for miniature pumpkins last fall and planted a couple of them in one of the flowerbeds behind my house. The one that came up first, and created a monster vine, produced 7 small ghost pumpkins! The other one came up later and only produced one yellow and orange skinned pumpkin.

I harvested them all last week and took three to my daughter for her dining room table; I haven’t decided whether to put my 5 on the island in my kitchen or on our breakfast table. They are not large enough to be worthwhile cooking/eating. Perhaps next year I’ll get some pie pumpkin seeds and grow pumpkins in several beds around the house. The vines look very lush and green for most of the season.

Maybe I’ll try a Zentangle pattern on one of the ghost pumpkins….

Fantastic Caverns – October 2023

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A cold fall day – the 60 degrees F. tour inside Fantastic Caverns was warmer than outside! We arrived shortly before 10 AM and had almost no wait before our tour (via Jeep-drawn tram) began. I used the ‘night scene’ setting (causing the camera to stack multiple images for each image) to capture the cave scenes. My favorite is a zoomed image of ‘soda straw’ structures on the ceiling – with water droplets visible!

There are plenty of drapery and column formations to photograph. The lighting in the cave does a good job of enhancing the structures. Unfortunately, it also encourages the greening tinge (algae) to some of the formations.

This was my second visit to Fantastic Caverns, and I quickly realized that different guides emphasize different things. For example – I am pretty sure the guide for my first visit did not share that the darker gray color in the formation below is from manganese!

The reddish color in many of the formations is from iron….and the white is calcium carbonate without anything else to provide color.

Back at the visitor center – I enjoyed a display of pumpkins and other squashes/gourds.

Another successful outing…and afterward on the way back to my house we enjoyed a huge BBQ lunch!

Hummingbird Moth

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While I was doing the daily check of my miniature pumpkin vine (it now has at least 8 pumpkins), I noticed a hummingbird moth on one of the leaves. I took initial pictures with my phone (Samsung Galaxy S10e) then hurried inside to get my bridge camera (Canon Powershot SX-70 HS) with more optical zoom capability. Note: Click on any of the smaller images to see an enlarged version.

Fortunately, the moth has stayed on the. I got a few shots with the bridge camera

Before the moth took off to get some nectar. The wings move so fast that even in bright sunlight, they are blurred. Note the coiled proboscis as the moth flies away in the last shot.

The moth didn’t go far. It rested on a nearby flower. Maybe the morning was a little too cool for it to be moving around a lot. A little research revealed that it was a Snowberry Clearwing….probably a male.

Ten Little Celebrations – July 2023

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Celebrating is often linked with appreciation. When I notice that I am celebrating something – I almost always notice that I appreciate that it happened or how beautiful it is…or just that it is a brilliant positive in my day.   Noticing little things to celebrate/appreciate every day is a habit that builds mental resilience!

Miniature pumpkins on the vine. I planted the seeds back in May, not confident that they would be more than vines. They started to bloom – and I enjoyed the flowers. I am celebrating the recognizable little pumpkins now.

A new low weight of the year. Slowly but surely…I am getting to the ‘normal’ weight for my height. Every time I reach a new low for the year, I celebrate!

Ozark (Missouri) farmers market. I was overwhelmed by the crowd at the farmers market in Springfield and underwhelmed by the sparse number of vendors in Nixa. I celebrated that the Ozark farmers market was the Goldilocks (i.e. ‘just right’).

2 ‘hens and chicks’ planted. I finally planted something new in the front flower bed; it wasn’t a simple task since it required moving rock and cutting away landscaping fabric underneath. I celebrated the completed project…and am enjoying the anticipation of ‘chicks’ appearing before fall.

Getting the lawn mowed. Avoiding high temperatures…rain..heavy due. I celebrated that the night was dry, the light dew in the morning, and the temperatures still in the 70s when I did the mowing.

Intensity minutes while gardening. This summer I have increased my ‘intensity minutes’ rather than simply sustaining my low sedentary time. Mowing generally results in ‘intensity minutes’…but I celebrated when some of my general gardening did too!

Lake Springfield meadow. There is something different to celebrate every time I go. In July the uptick in dragonflies and butterflies was the high-point.

Sprinklers all working. We noticed that one zone of our sprinkler system was not working when the grass started turning brown…so we celebrated when it was fixed (and also that we got rain too) and the grass started its recovery.

Rounding of 3 corners in our yard. I had an idea to round the corners of our yard to make mowing easier (curves rather than right angles) and celebrated that the actions I took for 3 corners (planting some and putting down landscaping cloth to kill grass so that I can plant something) is working!

Test at doctors office shows all OK. Its always worth celebrating when a test comes back with the desired result….of course, with some measure of relief too.

Yard Work – July 2023

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July has been a busy month yard work. The hotter weather and failure of a zone in our sprinkler system (which we didn’t notice immediately) resulted in less mowing…but other jobs more than made up for time savings.

My irises did not have a lot of blooms last spring, so I checked one of the beds and discovered that it was so clogged with rhizomes that they were no longer covered with soil. I dug up a huge mass…broke the rhizomes apart and planted them in the mound of dirt where the pine tree used to be. That meant extra watering of the mound. I also transplanted some lambs ear to the mound. The location is sunnier that the previous place the irises were and I am hoping for more blooms next spring. The downside is – I won’t see them from my office window. I also have more iris beds that I haven’t checked yet.

I also decided to round the corners of my back yard so that it would be easier to mow. I dug up lambs ear that had come up in the yard for two corners that already did not have much grass and put landscaping fabric down in a third. After the grass dies under the landscaping cloth, I’ll transplant iris rhizomes to that corner.

A local farmers market had hens and chicks (small so I guess they were chicks). I bought 2…cleared away rock and landscaping cloth in my front flowerbed and hope they will create a new texture for the bed. They might even grow on the top of the rocks!

My wildflower garden is doing well for the first year. I am watering it frequently along with the miniature pumpkin plant that I planted nearby. So far – there are 5 miniature pumpkins on the vine!

Our most robust pine has become my place for larger items I pull from other beds. The pine needles and opportunistic plants growing there add to the contrasts.

Overall – a good month for the yard. I am slowly but surely making the adjustments I want!

May Yard Work

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There is a noticeable uptick in yard work in May….always something to do. The temperature is warm enough – and there is sufficient rain – for the grass to need to be mowed (weed eating/edging) weekly. Most of the time my strategy is to do the front yard one day and the back the next. In the back I am realizing it was a mistake to plant alliums in the grass since they are not done yet….so there is a patch of taller grass along with them.

There was one week that had a lot of rain in the forecast, so I opted to mow everything in one day before the rain. I took a little break after I used up the batteries…only a little left to go and I needed some down time anyway. When I started again, the most robust pine in our yard was in my path. When I bumped it – yellow pollen swirled through the air – and I diverted to give it wide berth. Some of the grass near it did not get mowed! The allergic reaction didn’t start until somewhat later – one of the worst of the year so far; I didn’t even realize I was allergic to pine pollen until now.

One of our other pines is problematic. It is leaning toward other landscaping and our house – the ground freshly heaved upward. The arborist says it can’t be saved so they will come soon to take it down.    

Both rose bushes appear dead. They are older but the landscaping fabric/rocks were added by the previous owner before she put the house on the marker and they might have caused them a problem. I’ll start cutting them up and burning the sticks in my chiminea fire pit soon – a better solution than cutting them up and taking them to the recycling center (yard waste) since the thorns making handling hazardous.

I cleared away rocks and landscaping fabric from an area and planted sunflowers, black eyed susans, cone flowers, gladiolus, and a wildflower mix in the big plan and some mini-pumpkin seeds in a smaller area nearby.

I sprinkled the area with spent flowers and empty edamame pods as a kind of celebration of the bed after I finished. I’ll be collecting seeds from the things that grow this year (except for the gladiolus) to plant in other areas next year. Creating places to plant has been hard  work (rock is heavy and landscaping fabric is tough).

Realizing that the weight of the rocks might be a problem for some of our other plants, I raked rocks away from the small cedars that have looked sick from the beginning. And there are more plants that might need the same help. Always something else that needs to be done in the yard!