Good day everyone! Zak here from a very hot Cape Town, South Africa!
It is 8pm and I am sitting before my PC in shorts and slacks and I am sweating! The sun is only now dipping towards the horizon and it is still very light outside!
But the pictures in this post are from this morning... around 6:30am and it is quite light... so you do the math! That's a lot of sunlight hours!
My veggie patch is doing alright. This is the first, non-christmas month of me getting used to me prepaid water meter and I hope I can expand my watering once my budget settles down.
At least the basil and the butternut is going well!
The main box is overgrown. Though there are yellow leaves in there that I am going to cut out and thinning out leaves that look sickly. Right on the money as predicted by @lex-zaiya when we got together recently, there was powdery mildew on the older leaves. So I just cut them out.
There are fruits all over the plant...
But when they look like this early on, I just remove them. I have no idea why it makes these or why they fail. The stem is quite healthy at this point.
The plant made a lot of these in the beginning and now it makes far less of them.
This plant has creeped out of the box, across a pallet that I laid on the ground and it is now on the veggie garden fence. I am just weaving it along there and seeing what happens!
Two more fruit!
And another big one!
The biggest one seems almost ripe enough to harvest. I need to check it with a fingernail if it is hard then I can harvest it. You are not meant to harvest too early either, otherwise the nutrients from the squash will go into the seeds to mature them.
Here is another big one. I placed a plate beneath it to prevent it from rotting on the ground... I think I need to pull off that dry flower as well...
Look how big these leaves are!
Trellis 2's vine... perhaps this is too much? Do I prune it back and cut this off?
The fence vine is carrying fruit too.
Here is one of those failed fruits again... the issue does seem to come from the flower... maybe pick them off early?
Basil is going well along with its ground-cover buddies. Keeps the soil wetter for longer.
Again, check the size of this leaf!
Here is one of my cuttings that I grew in the kitchen. I cut off a part of another plant, stuck it in some water in the kitchen and waited for roots to grow. Now I have planted it and its about a week later and it looks like its growing merrily!
So I am going to grow some more cuttings!
Remember to pinch off the flowers on the basil plants to stop the plant from dying!
So we strip off the bottom leaves off these stems and cut off the step at a node point (where the leaves come out). The leaves do not need to be under the water.
I am trying a diagonal cut from the stems. Usually this is what we did at a flower shop I worked at to increase the surface area of the cut and allows the plant to absorb water better.
Now I just need to change the water in the cups every day and see what happens!
That's it from me! Thank you for reading!
Cheers!
@zakludick
