Mirrors and Tombstones

Imagine looking in the mirror every morning (for a week or two) and seeing this:

You might hear, "Dahling, quit dilly-dallying."

Or this might be cool, sort of Fonzarellian (think Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli, "the Fonz" on Happy Days):

Here are some pretty bugs -- pretty darn nasty.  Our chickens have been getting most of them this year.  If you don't have chickens, I understand spraying them with a mixture of warm water, vinegar and some dishwashing liquid will send them to la-la land.  They suck, trying to destroy all the brassicas before moving on to other crops.  These two Harlequins are enjoying Brussels sprouts.  Aren't they beautiful? 

Here are some German Cushaw squash I trained to hang on the fence.

"Are you sure?" says Virginia.

Well, the seeds came from a Southern Exposure Seed Exchange packet labeled "green-striped cushaw."  A Google search of cushaw brings up several pictures of what I thought were Georgia candy roasters, which happen to be growing to the left of these guys.  Here's one:

Whatever, these are giant winter squash.  Cut one open and it feeds two people for two weeks.

If you read my blog entry from yesterday, about cleaning up the greenhouse, here you can see what I've been doing -- pulling weeds, then covering with a layer of black plastic under a layer of black mesh cloth, and in the aisles, a rubber mat.  The wooden 2 x 6's will form the back sides of two more beds -- I'll be cutting and removing the plastic to the rubber runner -- in which I'll plant, who knows, maybe lettuce, broccoli, artichokes?  In each corner, I covered the black mesh with mulch and then four 2 x 6s that hold a broken marble tombstone that's intended to keep the greenhouse from blowing away in a storm.  No grave robbing;  a friend of ours who digs graves brought us four rejected broken tombstones.

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