Garden status 2025-10-10: Selection of weird squash.

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My Duolingo renewal date is this month. I used to love Duolingo, but I have gotten so tired of how they completely screwed up my progress on the Mandarin course several times that I now canceled my subscription. I will probably keep doing a minimal one lesson a day for now, but am close to ditching it entirely.

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My last living grandparent passed away in September at age 87. I have thus traveled back home and made my first visit to Oconto in northern Wisconsin in more than a decade. It was bittersweet and surreal to meet so many family members I have not been among since half my life ago, when I last saw Grandma.

Grandma Porath with me and my brothers Ben and Tim and the cats, two of which we brought home, in the mid 1990s.

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September went quickly. I got sucked into my new classes, of which I am taking four: Second semester organic chemistry, first and second semesters of physics and physiology. It’s already intense. But over in the garden, some of the squash are starting to be fully developed. Most exciting, I have tomatoes! But they are very small!

Garden status 2025-09-17: Starting to be able to harvest tomatoes. Some of them taste so good!

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In August I started to get some mature cucumbers and a few beans and zucchini, but not much else. I upgraded the tomatoes from 5 to 7 gallon buckets and added cages in that process using 4 inch square wire fencing.

Garden status 2025-08-26

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July is when most of the squash started growing well, and I realized I planted way too much too close together. I also started getting powdery mildew on the pumpkins and aphids on the kale.

Garden status 2025-07-17: Now we're getting pumpkin flowers every day. So cool.

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In June the potatoes and butternut and acorn squash really started to take off. Everything else I transplanted barely grew at all. I started to consider if I should plant fresh seed to avoid transplant shock.

Garden status 2025-06-26: Transplanted the squash into their final growing spots. Probably too tight, but we'll see.

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It wasn’t quite as quick and cheap and easy as I was hoping, but I have painted a new pride flag instead of buying yet another replacement for the one that faded too quickly. Pictured at left is a 210D polyester flag flown about 12 months from June 2024 to June 2025. At the right is a much cheaper one flown about 6 months from November 2023 to May 2024.

My newly painted pride flag between two sadly faded ones.

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The time came to use more of the 2 in. x 12 in. x 12 ft. boards to make a third garden bed. I realized the second one was already too high up into the shade to be very useful, so this one needed to go lower down the hill. I hoped to put it at the top initially, but now it will need to eat into my wood chipped dog chilling area. It also needed to cut into my drainage trench unfortunately, but not a big deal.

Third raised bed complete!

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In May I finished transplanting seedlings into the first garden bed and tomatoes into 18 pots.

Garden status 2025-05-22

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The first garden bed ended up being nowhere as big as I thought once I actually planted things, so I built another one up the hill from the first. This time I bought new lumber from Home Depot, which was out of stock of everything I hoped for. I had to go with much larger 2 in. x 12 in. x 12 ft. boards, which were naturally much more expensive as well! But it turned out all right.

After cutting all the branches in smaller pieces, they compacted down pretty well. I'm sure there are tons of air gaps though I won't be able to fill well.

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The rest of April’s gardening activities included starting potatoes, kale and butternut squash outside and many types of tomatoes inside.

Planting potatoes.

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Last week I got inspired to build a garden bed into my backyard hillside using some discarded fence boards and other wood lying around my property. It took me a while to decide where to put it, but once I got going, it was mostly done within a day. I’m quite happy with the space!

Completed first raised bed using mostly salvaged wood.

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It all started when I found a cat January 18. In the days were waiting for the shelter to open, we looked at the Oakland Animal Services website perhaps too much. So many dogs need homes; indeed, it’s where we found Ruffie in 2023. Alan thus applied to foster a dog.

Winter resting while I study on the dog couch.

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In the middle of some turmoil involving our own two cats, we had some added excitement in January thanks to my randomly deciding to take Ruffie for a short walk to meet Alan at the bus stop at 20:45 Saturday night. On the way down there, I found a small carrier with what seemed to be an animal inside.

A male cat I found in a carrier abandoned on a sidewalk near the bus stop.

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