Click on a thumbnail picture below to see the full size version. 88 Entries. Friday, January 5 View Page I just watched this video this morning, it blew me away. So I thought I would share it with anyone who might be interested. Every successful giant pumpkin grower knows the importance of soil biology to plant health. Why should it be any different with human health? We need a diverse flora starting in our mouth and going through our gut etc. By using some of the products we use, we are often killing off the very microorganisms that our there to help us. THis video takes about an hour to watch, I know we are in a rush, rush society. I even had to force myself to sit through it because I know it is important. I would think nothing of it to sit through an hour long video about growing giant vegetables, rarely would I sit and take the time to watch an hour long video about human health. Our personal health is actually far more important (dare I say) than growing giant vegetables. Without your own personal health you aren't going to be able to grow much of anything. YouTube video   Wednesday, January 10 View Page I was in Newport Rhode Island in the beginning of December Newport is a great place to go if you like trees At the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century gardening was popular among the elite. Plant explorers were circling the globe in search of hardy plants that would grow in the USA uk France and other places in Europe. Everyone had to have the latest and greatest new cultivar or species. The plants were collected like trading cards. It was an exciting time in horticulture. The tree in the photo is a London plane tree which is a cross between the American sycamore and a Chinese species of sycamore. It is easy to distinguish the difference as the London plane bears its seed balls in clusters of two. The American sycamore “buttonballs” are born singly. usually the London planes are a cream colored mottling and Americans are a white mottling.   Wednesday, January 10 View Page Two massive dwarf Alberta spruce on the campus of Salve Regina university. These are probably fifteen to twenty feet tall proving that given enough time even dwarf trees can grow big. luckily they had plenty of room and were allowed to keep growing.   Wednesday, January 10 View Page When I used to work at a retail nursery people would come in and tell me “a tree grew out of my bush”. After asking a few questions I usually could figure out what they meant by that. In the picture you see the back side of one of the dwarf Alberta spruce. It has a regular looking spruce growing out of the tree this is called a reversion. The dwarf Alberta spruce cultivar is nothing more than a mutation. The reversion is the tree reverting back to its true self. If a gardener doesn’t cut out that reversion soon it will grow like gang busters and eventually the whole tree will need to be removed. If it is removed soon the tree will be fine and not have much of a dead spot.   Wednesday, January 10 View Page An English oak in full green leaves in early December.   Wednesday, January 17 View Page I haven’t been paying much attention to the weather this winter as it has been mild and super wet. I was watching the Kansas City chiefs play over the weekend and I was shocked to see how cold it was in Kansas City. I knew that weather was on its way here well it’s here now!!!!   Friday, January 26 View Page Not too much going on in the garden. I planted purple top turnips as a cover crop. They always do great and also provide some food or animal feed. They seem to be much more freeze tolerant than the daikon radishes which are already soft these turnips are still hard and edible. We had a couple nights around nine degrees yet they are still good   Tuesday, February 6 View Page Last week my son had shoulder surgery in Hartford I had some time to blow so I went to one of my favorite parks. The Elizabeth park rose garden. This place is gorgeous in June. Many people get married there. Such a beautiful place. Even in the middle of winter.   Tuesday, February 6 View Page Another angle of the rose garden.   Tuesday, February 6 View Page A weeping blue atlas cedar arbor.   Tuesday, February 6 View Page A hellebore getting ready to flower.   Tuesday, February 6 View Page One of the greenhouses at Elizabeth park.   Tuesday, February 6 View Page A ver large mature sour wood tree, Oxydendron arboreum   Tuesday, February 6 View Page This is a normal branch from a chamaecyparis obtusa ‘nana gracilis’. (Dwarf hinoki false cypress) in the next entry you will see a branch where the tree is reverting back to its true form.   Tuesday, February 6 View Page You can see two different looking types of foliage if you look closely one is the correct type for the nana gracillis cultivar the other is normal for the species. When you are dealing with horticultural mutations you always have to be on the look out for them being unstable and reverting back to there true type. Some mutations are more stable than the others.   Thursday, February 8 View Page Rampart gourds. These dried up nice, I just left them outside. Simple. It is getting close to melon starting time, I will have to get the seeds out soon   Tuesday, February 13 View Page After several neatly snowless winters we got a big snowstorm today. We just got 14 inches. It is a winter wonderland outside. For those of you in warm climates who have never experienced this, everything is quiet and still and it is like waking up to a different world.   Tuesday, February 13 View Page Another shot of the snow. It has been an easy winter so far and there is no frost in the ground so this will make for a big clean up come spring.   Tuesday, February 13 View Page Another shot of the snow. It has been an easy winter so far and there is no frost in the ground so this will make for a big clean up come spring.   Monday, February 19 View Page I still have two 146.5 young seeds. Maybe I will grow these in their own roots in some new soil   Tuesday, March 5 View Page It's still winter, and not much going on yet in the garden so I thought that I would take the time to brag about and share this little "trophy" of mine. About ten or so years ago the good folks who make "Lucky Charms" cereal had a contest to win a very special box of cereal. It was a box of lucky charms with nothing but marshmallows. .. no cereal at all in the box. All you had to do was cut out the UPC symbol on the box and mail it to the general mills company, the winners would be chosen at random. If you were one of the lucky ones who got chosen, you would receive a box of this very special collectable cereal. There were only a couple thousand boxes that were to be given out. Well I eagerly clipped the upc symbol off the box and mailed it in.... nothing happened for months, I didn't give it much thought, I just assumed I hadn't won. Then one day in what seemed like a year later this box shows up in the mail with a special certificate. That day was surely one of the greatest days of my life, right up there with my wedding day and birth of my kids.   Monday, March 11 View Page Back in the 90s when I was in college at UConn for horticulture and also doing an internship at the Arnold Arboretum. It was known that hard to grow plants would need a pinch of soil taken from the mother plant in doing this you would inoculate the new plant with the essential soil biology that these plants need to grow the ericaceous plants are like this. they need very specific mycorrhizae that are unique to that family. They will often struggle without the proper microbiology, this family includes rhododendron, blueberry mountain, Laurel, Heath, and Heather this product is supposed to help inoculate them.   Monday, March 11 View Page Here are the active ingredients. Hopefully this stuff helps to get my new blueberry plants off to a good start. Back in those early days when I was first starting out in horticulture I never realized that vegetable crops like pumpkins etc could also could benefit from mycorrhizae. So much has been discovered and there is so much more left to be discovered. The more we kno, the more we realize we have so much more to know.   Thursday, March 14 View Page Tillage radish all winter killed. I think it dies at 15 degrees or so.   Thursday, March 14 View Page Purple top turnip is still alive. I think they die around ten degrees or so   Thursday, March 14 View Page Purple top turnip is still alive. I think they die around ten degrees or so   Thursday, March 14 View Page The season has begun in the high tunnel. Lettuce, potatoes,cabbage, broccolli snow peas, carrots and kale   Sunday, March 17 View Page Imagine tending a garden that had to be weeded and cared for year round for decades with out stop. You would want to find a way to help make managing that garden easier. Well for Ken D (Owner/cofounder of bp.com) he has a situation that is like tending a garden year round. Keeping this site free from bots is a daily chore for him. He has told me he gets hundreds of bots trying to infiltrate this site daily. He was his ways of Identifying and weeding them out and keeping the "weeds" from gaining a foothold here on bp.com. This endeavor takes up Ken's time every day. We can help Ken manage this site by paying the small $15 per year premium member fee. Once someone pays the premium member fee it identifies them as "not a bot". Ken told me "bots will never pay". If you are a regular user of this site I ask you to consider becoming a premium member. It will help Ken manage the site and it will also help offset the costs to run the Mainframe server and all the other costs Ken incurs like the electricity and commercial grade wifi. Over the past year I have gotten to know Ken personally and I know he isn't the type of person that like's to toot his own horn or ask people for anything. That is why I felt the need to say this and let you all know.   Sunday, March 17 View Page Speaking of the internet being a "weedy" place got me thinking about a skit Dave Chappelle made over twenty years ago. Called "What if the internet was a real place?" Over twenty years later things really haven't changed much, perhaps you could argue that things have gotten worse because the real con artists don't "Pop Up", they prefer to stay out of sight. Go to the 1:27 mark if you want to just watch the part about the internet. YouTube video   Tuesday, March 19 View Page These melons just came out of the grafting dome. Check out the roots growing off of the stem. The bushel gourds and rampart didn’t do this. Only the’ tetsukabuto’ squash rootstock did. I guess I don’t have to feel so bad about letting them get so leggy.   Monday, April 1 View Page I couldn’t resist, I was at agway last week and they had a bunch of hellebores (Lenten rose). I have wanted one for a while. I couldn’t resist, It was an impulse buy. lol   Sunday, April 14 View Page It is funny how dogmatic and also pragmatic gardeners often are, it drives me nuts. WHat I mean by that is when you talk to gardeners they always know the "right" way to do something, and in their minds it has to be done that way or else it will fail and won't be right. We probably should be the least dogmatic and pragmatic out of all professions as the more we know and the more experienced we become we should realize that there is more we don't know than we do know. There is nothing set in stone, and there are many ways to accomplish our goals if we ask ourselves questions. Like... Why do I have to do it that way? What is the purpose of doing it that way? What are the results of doing it that way? Could we achieve the same result with another way? Yet we insist on carving out all these rules and regulations and laws for doing what we do. When much of it is unneccesary. We need to think about what we are doing and why we are doing it, and that means we have to stick our necks out and try things that others aren't trying. Do things that others aren't doing. And when they fail which they often do, we have to be OK with it. We are all so different and we all see things a bit differently and come from different climates around the world. We also have different God given gifts, some of you are scientific and mathematical others are artistic and creative. Both types are needed in furthering this sport.   Sunday, April 14 View Page In my last entry, I mentioned how we are often dogmatic and pragmatic in our approach to gardening. Many years ago I read a book about running a landscaping business. The book was called 'Systems for Success' by Dwight Hughes. Dwight mentioned that half the time landscapers are doing things a cettain way just because that was the way they were taught and because of that they have always done things the same way with out questioning why. He illustrates this point with a short story that went something like this. I will paraphrase it as best as I can from my memory. A newly wed couple is getting ready to celebrate their first Christmas together and for dinner the new wife is cooking up a ham. As she is preparing it to go in the oven, her husband is watching her, and notices that she cuts both ends of the ham off before putting it in the oven. He is confused by what she has just done and asks her. "Why did you just cut both ends of the ham off before putting it on the baking tray and into the oven". The wife then replies; I don't really know why.... it is how my mother always did it.... and her ham always came out great. I will call her and ask her why it has to be done that way." So she calls her mom and asks her "Why do you have to cut both ends of the ham off before it goes into the oven?" The mother then replies "Geez I don't really know why, that is just how I saw my mother do it, and her ham always came out great. WHy don't you call her and ask her." So the newlywed then calls her grandma and says, "Grandma I have a question that I need an answer too. But so far have been unsuccessful in getting one. WHy is it that you always have to cut the ends off your ham before you bake it? THe grandma then chuckled and replied "Oh that's silly, of course you don't have to cut the ends off your ham before you bake it. The only reason I used to cut the ends off the ham before I baked it is because I didn't have a pan big enough to bake it in, so I needed to cut some off so it would fit in the pan!   Thursday, April 18 View Page I thought this was interesting. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7569811/   Thursday, May 2 View Page I got my giant melons in early this year. They are cooking nicely under the row cover. Row cover is the way to go you never have to vent them. It is low maintenance.   Thursday, May 9 View Page I was just reading vineman's diary and he had a question about which plant he should keep. It got me thinking that perhaps in a certain way he does get to keep both even after he culls one. Let me explain what I mean by this, WHen two plants of the same species are grown in close proximity to each other the roothaiir tips that grow and touch each other between the two plants can and often do graft together. I would bet that this phenomenon could be helpful to us as growers who are trying to get a big root system to grow a big plant and pumpkin. Here is a scientific study that I found which proves that root grafting does occur in vegetables. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1343943X.2019.1679649   Wednesday, May 15 View Page This is the 1908 Connolly I also have a 1570 ciesielski and a 1904 sperry. There were a couple others I wanted to plant this year but i figured it woould be better to focus on just three plants. Hopefully less is more and I can grow these really big! They look pretty good for this early in the year, but are growing quite slowly in this cool weather. No heating and no venting is nice. Plus I won’t have to gasp when I get my electric bill at the end of the month. They will get the size I need them to be in plenty of time for my mid to late June pollination date goal.   Wednesday, May 15 View Page 167 Holloway on tetsukabuto rootstock. The watermelons are doing better than the pumpkins….. by far.   Thursday, May 23 View Page 159.6 ciesielski JBD watermelon on 'Rampart' rootstock. I am pleased with how the melons are growing, they are ahead of schedule for some reason this year. I hope to get a mid June pollination, which I have never done before. I will have to try my hand at manually pollinating these. Normally the bees do it for me. The problem is that they miss all the early females. In late July and August the bees do a great job! There are so many culls, it is like picking cucumbers!!   Thursday, May 23 View Page 1570 ciesielski AG. I took there covers off, yesterday and voila!! Hordes of Cucumber beatles were on them today. Probably hundreds! I am glad I chose to walk down to the patch and see how things were going! It just proves that you have to have a constant eye on things or they will go south quickly. I think I am done with the row covers for the year. I have a bad habit of not checking on the plants when they are covered. I will sacrifice some early growth and vigor, but I will be able to easily monitor them and see what is going on with out the covers in the way. I like to look at them in the AM with a cup of coffee in my hand!   Friday, June 7 View Page Melons are ahead of schedule this year. let me try this again and see if I can get the picture right side up.   Friday, June 7 View Page Much better. I love the edit feature. Now if I could just completely erase some of my dumbest posts. LOL. Each melon has roughly 288 square feet to fill in, It is a bit smaller than my usual 360 square feet, but if a plant collapses it can be removed so it's neighbor can fill that space. I will miss my normal layout with long skinny plants. It was easy to get access to the culls from each side. This year will be different. I will be going barefoot through my patch looking for culls. This will be a big jungle and completely closed in byn this months end. Hopefully I have some big melons by then that are taking up most of the plants energy. In the foreground you see my 159.6 Ciesielski JBD on a rampart rootstock, then going up the photo from there we have; 160 Houston Carolina cross on a 'Tetsukabuto' squash 232 Williams JBD on a 'Tetsukabuto squash 175 Ciesielski CCx JBD F2 Hybrid on a 'Tetsukabuto' squash 167 Holloway JBD on a ' Tetsukabuto' squash   Monday, June 10 View Page Pumpkin patch. I am happy with their size for this time of year. Three plants in total. About 600 square feet per plant. A 1904 sperry a 1908 Connolly and a 1570 ciesielski.   Monday, June 17 View Page A trial row of tomatoes this year. They are all new and unusual varieties from Baker Creek seeds. We are curious to see which of these varieties are worth incorporating into our annual tomato line up. 'Green Giant' is supposed to be one of the best tasting in Baker Creeks catalog! I have 6 plants of each of the following varieties, I will let you know which ones are worth eating and which aren't. I am not expecting much from the black ones as far as taste goes. Also I am a bit nervous about the green ones, that I won't know when they are ripe. 'Ananias Noir' 'Green Giant' 'Black Beauty' 'Queen of the Night'   Monday, June 17 View Page I planted a couple long gourd seeds at the base of this dead tree I don’t remember which seed it was. Hopefully I can get a few.   Monday, June 17 View Page 71.6 english giant canteloupe. I direct seeded on Memorial Day. I will have to thin down to one. I may transplant the other two.   Monday, June 17 View Page 80 house field pumpkin. Growing on a pile of fresh cow manure shavings and hay.   Monday, June 17 View Page Not everything looks good. This is my 268 bushel gourd I am sure it will turn around.   Monday, June 17 View Page 104.5 ruthruff giant butternut First year trying these. Direct seeded Memorial Day   Monday, June 17 View Page 72 house field pumpkin   Wednesday, June 19 View Page Melon patch. I am humbled by this terrific start. Waiting for the shhhhhh to hit the fan.   Wednesday, June 19 View Page 159.6 ciesielski jbd. On rampart. This plant is loaded with sets. Not sure why. Perhaps because it is the only plant not on inter-specific squash rootstock. The squash are too vigorous if that is possible. lol.   Wednesday, June 19 View Page A bigger set on my 159.6. Maybe I should have set that one up with the rack and shade tent Don’t ask me which one is older I don’t know!!!!!! Details are not my strength.   Wednesday, June 19 View Page A nice long set on my 232 Williams. Another dark beauty. I am addicted to them   Saturday, June 22 View Page How many times in a year do you ask yourself the following questions about growing giant pumpkins 1. Why am I still doing this? 2. Or do you Console yourself with thoughts of taking a year off next year? or maybe the thought of this being your last year. I think many of us would be lying if we didn't answer yes. But then winter comes and we rest... get recuperated.... and we gear up for another year and more battles. I just came out of the patch dripping wet with sweat, shirt fully saturated, asking myself the first question WHy ??? I could wait until later tonight... but I wont be here.... plus it is supposed to thunder and rain. So It gets done now. I had a UPS subcontracter delivery guy try and take a short cut through my property. He went off the Wood Chip road and ran over about half a dozen "rocket booster" vines. (The tertiaries that I run back on the first secondary vines on each side) Also I have been battling with Mites. (usually they only show up on my melons) A few entries back I said "I am waiting for the shhh to hit the fan". I have been growing giants for a while now and from prior experience I know that typically the shhh hits the fan in the end of June or beginning of July often coinciding with a heat wave. So be warned keep those squash bugs off NOW if you don't want YVD later!!! A friend of mine who had been in the millitary told me his sergeant used to say to him "Mind your P's." Which means... Prior planning prevents piss poor performance.   Saturday, June 22 View Page "Rocket booster” tertiary vines crushed by the UPS contractor delivery driver. No big deal. It could have been worse for sure.   Saturday, June 22 View Page “ rocket boosters”, tertiaries. crushed by UPS contractor delivery driver   Tuesday, June 25 View Page Melons are all filled in.   Tuesday, June 25 View Page 159.6 ciesielski melon. I have another melon on the same plant that is just as big. I may keep both   Saturday, June 29 View Page I saw this on Facebook and thought it was funny. I could go a step farther and say if you are OK with doing Giant pumpkin growing you’re already farming. And thus a part of the madness, that is farming. Most modern people don't understand what it is like to be a farmer. Well it is quite similar to being a giant pumpkin grower. Let me explain... When your friends ask you "How much did you win?, or how much did you sell that pumpkin for?" Then you tell them how much… lets say you won $1000. That friend will always be shocked and in their mind, it is like you won the lottery or a card game. That couldn't be farther from the truth, even the best growers consider it a successful season when they can break even with their input costs. Lets not even factor in labor, because if we did, That would even put Travis Gienger's world record breaker last year into the negative..... Perhaps at least it would make it pretty darn close to neutralizing any profitability. The same is true for farmer’s. A farmer might come home from the farmers market with thousands of dollars in his or her pocket. But the true cost, the sustainable cost may still not be met! Let’s face it, We aren't doing this for any monetary gains, it is nice when the winnings come, but think about all the blown pumpkins and ripped out plants that come between the successes. Even Travis has them too. (although I would argue that perhaps he has the fewest of any elite grower) Look at the Paton's last few years they have had some elite pumpkins fall just short of the finish line. Even though I am not half the grower of the Paton's or Travis. As a grower I still know that disappointment and loss as we all do...but for me it is at a much smaller level. So why do we do this at all? Because we love it, some might say it is in our Blood, or dna. I think it is a blessing and a priveledge to be able to grow giant Pumpkins and a garden in general. Most modern people have never left the city and have never been exposed to growing a tomato, or planting a tree or tending a garden. I think this is sad. I believe we were meant to live a life with simple pleasures that tie us to the land and all of God’s creation. After all What was the job that God gave Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden before the fall? “It was to tend the garden”.   Sunday, June 30 View Page Massive thunderstorms here tons of rain in a short amount of time this is what the wheelbarrow look like in about an hour of rain no power right now weirdly we still have Wi-Fi. I have my predator generator that’s powering the house or part of it at least   Sunday, June 30 View Page A picture of some of the washout from the garden   Sunday, June 30 View Page The dill got washed out. Hopefully I can uncover some of it, and the rest of it will pop up. This kind of stuff happens every year. You can never escape, things have been going well so far, we were due   Sunday, June 30 View Page Luckily, these eggplant and peppers were tall enough to take the deluge and all the silt and sand that got washed on top of them   Sunday, June 30 View Page This photo is at the top of the garden. This is where the erosion began. I have to figure out a way to go no till on the spot because it’s on a slight slope   Sunday, June 30 View Page This is one of the spots where all that silt and sand wound up. It’s easy to see how bottomland soils get made.   Sunday, June 30 View Page Luckily, not too much silt got washed into Atlantic giant pumpkins. I don’t like to see their vines covered with anything. I’ll take the bottom root, but I don’t even cover the top. My thoughts are that there will be fewer roots but the roots they have can grow bigger and extend, and eventually equal the amount you’d have if you got the top one to root.   Sunday, June 30 View Page This is my 159.6 melon luckily they seem to have escaped any washou, stillt looking good   Sunday, June 30 View Page The farmer growing these field pumpkins obviously got a ton of overspray from his glyphosate application. I will keep an eye on these and see how they recover. I think it was some sort of test he was doing as he left half the field untreated. I have a feeling those ones will be much better in the long run as these will be stunted for a bit.   Monday, July 1 View Page I have to pick a lot of beans every year, so my trick is to pull the whole plants up. Once they’re fully ripe I pull the plants and pick the beans off in the shade, standing up from my trucks tailgate or a table. It’s much easier on my back and a lot more pleasant than being out in the sun I could pick the beans on the plants and get a couple crops, maybe two or three, but it’s easier for me to stagger the bean planting every two weeks, green beans go in every time my sweet corn goes in. I feed the picked bean plants to the cows, so nothing goes to waste   Monday, July 1 View Page This is captain Jack’s bug spray. It works great on potato beetles, it also works really well on European cabbage moth caterpillars. Anything that consumes leaves and takes out pieces of leaves. If it’s a piercing, sucking insect, it won’t work really well. This stuff is tops if you’re an organic grower, you have to try it. Actually I think it works as well as any thing, including the synthetics. It’s active ingredient is Spinosad, which is derived from a bacteria. Spinosad is very toxic to the insect. When the insect’s eat it, they will be dead the next day.   Saturday, July 6 View Page I have two melons on the 175 plant. This is a photo of the other melon. Both are about the same size. Maybe I’ll keep both. hopefully keeping two will allow the plant to sink its energy into these fruit rather than blowing up the stump. Oops I mean crown. My plants are not heavily pruned. They are rather wild compared to most melon growers. They are really thick and piled up like a jungle,vines on top of each other, reaching for the sky, overflowing the patch,I just don’t have the time to keep them super organized. I Try to do better on Atlantic Giants. My melon plants are poorly disciplined I suppose, unlike Nick McCaslin or Frank mud who run a tight ship.   Sunday, July 7 View Page This is the 159.6 Ciesielski black diamond. This is the first thing that has gone wrong with my melons so far. this nice young got a blossom end split. Fortunately, I did keep two melons on this plant so there’s still another one that has lots of potential. hopefully it can hold together.   Sunday, July 7 View Page In this photo, you can see that this plant has been stunted by these two actively growing melons. It is the only plant that isn’t overflowing. It’s alloted space. I really do like to get the melons to set early on a small plant. This can help limit plant size somewhat and hopefully reduce crown size and graft incompatibility problems.   Sunday, July 7 View Page This is a shot of the entire patch.   Sunday, July 7 View Page I have this long fat melon on a 232 Williams plant. I don’t think this will get a blossom end split. Perhaps the reason that I got the blossom end split is that we got 4 inches of rain on Friday night. it was a lot of rain in a very short amount of time   Sunday, July 7 View Page The pumpkins have just about filled in all their space about 700 ft.² per plant. I have three plants in this photo a 1904 Sperry, which is the runt of the patch it has been slow since day one when it took three weeks to germinate. When it finally did germinate, I had to put it on life support as one of the Cotyledon leaves was half rotten but I babied it because I really liked this seed and love to grow orange. it won’t disappoint by the looks of it! I think it’s going to be a good pumpkin, even though the vines are small like cucumber vines it is growing a big pumpkin very quickly. The 1908. Connolly is the middle plant it has a nice looking pumpkin around 100 pounds. The plant in the foreground is the 1570 Ciesielski it also has a nice pumpkin that looks like it will be orange around 100 pounds.   Monday, July 8 View Page The split melon was a four Lober, with a massive hollow heart. If you look on what was the the top of the melon, You can see a brown section in the rind.. that is from today, one day of being in the sun without cover, it shows how important it is to cover your melons.   Monday, July 8 View Page My 268 Ciesielski Bushel Gourd is starting to make a comeback. Hopefully I can beat my personal best of 268.   Monday, July 8 View Page This is a row of eating watermelons, they are growing out over plastic mulch. Unfortunately, the middle of the row is full of grass. I don’t think this will hurt the production at all. Some of the varieties in this row include 'jubilee', 'crimson sweet', 'sangria', 'Iopride', 'willhite tendergold' and 'Royal Golden'. There are also a few big and tasty seedless watermelons from Burpee in this row. the big and tasty look like a round compact Charleston Gray   Monday, July 8 View Page A row of cantaloupes, they are also known as muskmelons. A muskmelon is an eastern version of a western cantaloupe. (the type what you would find in the supermarket) Often a muskmelon would have ribbing and a very strong perfume or musk scent. When I was younger we would sell "Muskmelons" on my aunt and uncle's vegetable stand and that’s what we called them. I don’t know if people today still use that term. I think it’s a word that’s about to become extinct. The varieties that I am growing this year include 'Goddess', 'Cleopatra', 'Sarah’s choice' 'Crenshaw' And a weird one Called 'Kajari'   Saturday, July 13 View Page I saw some large wilting vines on many of my melon plants starting around yesterday or the day before. Immediately I assumed the worst-case scenario had happened, I assumed that the crowns had started to fail. Fortunately, it was just mice gnawing the vines in half, I never thought I would say fortunately it is just mice eating the vines, so far it appears that none have severed one of the the vines that a melon is on, so perhaps they are just helping me out with their selective pruning. LOL Anyways, I set some mice traps out and then put some mothballs around the patch in a desperate attempt to reduce their population and keep them out.   Saturday, July 13 View Page Another shot of a wilted vine.   Saturday, July 13 View Page 167 Holloway melon photo from the side. slowly, but surely it is starting to fill out its stem end. I am optimistic that it will be a symmetric melon by the end of the season   Saturday, July 13 View Page 167 Holloway Mellon from the rear   Saturday, July 13 View Page 175 Ciesielski melon it is a jumbo black diamond crossed with A Carolina Cross it is an F2 hybrid seed from back in the year 2018   Saturday, July 13 View Page This is probably the biggest melon in the patch as of right now. It is a big fat wide melon. This is on my 159.6 Ciesielski jumbo black diamond seed hopefully it’s not full of air like it’s twin that aborted.   Saturday, July 13 View Page This little future beauty is on a 1904 Sperry plant that has always been somewhat of a dwarf plant with smaller leaves and vines and slower growth, but the pumpkin certainly doesn’t look like it’s going to be a dwarf! The 1904 seed took three weeks to germinate I had given up on it. But lo and behold, I kind of scratched the top soil away from the seed and noticed a little tiny radical emerging from this seed. I pulled the seed out replanted it in a fresh potting soil with the cotyledon’s just above the surface, pointed tip down. it slowly emerged even though it had mostly rotten cortyledon leaves. I highly valued this plant because I knew it had potential.