Stuff keeps growing

My cucumbers all curve as they grow, but I tasted one for the first time today and it tastes great.

One of the window box tomato plants is making a couple more. Surprising. All of the okra is doing really, really well. I've harvested enough for two big batches of fried okra. I love it!

Meanwhile, at the other end of things the cantaloupe have flowers. I don't even like cantaloupe, but the seeds were free so I'm excited they are doing well too.

We've been having lots of hard rains. Photos to follow.

Collecting rain water

A Few Words of Advice: If you ever have to go to a 'free' medical clinic on a walk-in basis, writing 'large oozing lump on back' on the in-take form will get you called into triage and treated first. (I had to get an infected spider bite taken care of this week.)

Back in the garden. . .
The garden center tomato plants that were planted in mushroom compost in a very large pot have done very well. They are called 'Window Box Romas' and I think I'm going to try to save some of the seeds. They only grew to about 2 ft tall and produced over 2 dozen tomatoes. I think the mushroom compost had something to do with how well they grew because the Zappala-Santore roma tomato plants I also put in mushroom compost are growing very well and have blossoms now, too. All those I put in the ground are going very slowly and don't seem to have very robust stems either.
Here are the last of my Window Box Romas:


The okra is also doing very well and I fried up the first batch and ate it like popcorn a few nights ago. Here's the next round, just picked. And a cucumber.


I forgot to check on my potted okra plant for a few days and this is what happened:


They got chopped up and put in to the compost.

How to de-salinate the seaweed I'd recently collected has been a bit of a dilemma. Nature solve all my problems this week.

We had an enormous rain storm last weekend -- booming thunder, lightning, the works, and flash flood making downpour. Normally these storms don't last very long but when I realized that this one was going to go for a while I raced to the back, got several of my garden buckets and placed them where the gutters are broken and waterfall like streams of rain were coming down. Within a few minutes, I had all filled with water and the storm continued! So, in addition to the gallons and gallons of rain water, the seaweed which I've left spread out on the grass was rinsed clean.

The challenge the next day was to get the water from the front of the house where it collected to the back where it could be left to soak the seaweed. Cousin gave me an empty plastic trashcan with lid and I set to hauling rain water around the house to fill it. But firsts, I picked up all the seaweed, putting most into the trash can to be soaked and about 1/4 of it into my compost. Stir and wait.

I've been a fan of the UK charity, WaterAid since going to Glastonbury in 2007. They provided the best toilets and are doing good work. I learned a lot about the lack of clean water around the world at Glastonbury and how important it is to basic human health. As sensitive and aware as I like to think of myself, readily available clean water is something I was very much taking for granted. And yet, the first thing I had done after I bought my 'little green acres' was to have a well drilled. Anyway, I like WaterAid. I've recently become aware of an US charity (here we call them 'non-profits', 'charity' having somewhere along the line, become a pejorative for doing unto others as you would like them to do to you) -- charity: water. The name along made me partial to liking them, then there's their cause and they are very new but seem to be doing good work. I think getting the message across is 75% of any cause, the other 25% is getting people to give and then getting them to act. charity: water is getting the message out in very interesting ways, like using Twitter. So, there's WaterAid and there's charity: water. And there's me hauling collected rain water across the American lawn, around the crepe myrtle bush and into the side yard I'm using as a garden. As I went back and forth I thought of other women, little girl-women, old grandmother-women, women with babies strapped to their backs, all over the planet who have to do the same thing just to survive and I wished them well. When I was done I had filled the 32 gallon trash can, used the leftover to fill my watering cans, and wet my 2 compost piles. Then I went into the air-conditioned house ever mindful of the strange turns in history that have made me such a lucky person.