Juliancolton

I gave up eating strawberries because they suck. One out of every 10 is worth eating, and that's on a good day. Simply pointless.

Nah, I just grow veggies and let them rot in the field for fun. I follow the warning labels, apply well before the minimum number of days before harvest, and so on. Carbaryl is potent stuff but generally pretty safe as long as you don't handle it for a living.

The Milky Way tonight is the brightest I've seen it in a few years up here. Some good detail in the central dust lanes even with the unaided eye. Inversion refracting some of NYC's light pollution back down?

I have to use a buttload of pesticides against cucumber beetles and SVBs, so pollinators never come anywhere near my garden. Always have to pollinate cucurbits by hand, but just not getting any male blossoms so far on the summer squash. Yesterday's ovaries are still shiny and I'm wondering if this seed stock has some parthenocarpic traits? That'd be cool. Otherwise I'd have to assume the cool nights are just doing something funky to the plants' hormones. I'm sure you probably know this and just want to be extra safe, but tomato & peppers have perfect flowers and generally don't need any help with pollination. They're good to go with even a little bit of wind.

We're on pace for about 50 top-ten days this summer.

I have eight female zucchini blossoms open this morning and no males to pollinate them with. Truly, a tragedy befitting 2020.

A PWS up the road from me at a little lower elevation notched a 37. Pretty remarkable for the date.

39F here. My only regret is that I had but one window fan to pump that stuff into my bedroom.

Intolerable out here. If the sun comes out it'll just be death.

I'm sure the aquifer is still running fine i(u?)mby but I'll never know. Ye olde 8-foot pit FTL.

As is tradition. I've run it dry three out of the last three years and I've finally learned my lesson. No real help from Cristobal it appears.

Pick one for today's water allocation: 1) top off the pool, 2) water the gardens and do laundry, 3) pressure wash the patio

I almost stepped on a milk yesterday. The old mnemonic proved helpful: "black on yellow, you're a dead fel-- no, red on black-- wait, red, yellow... Jack's a dead fellow... but was it yellow on--?" and by the time you remember the doggone thing, the snake's long gone.

About ten feet away... closer than the length of my truck. It wasn't showing any signs of aggression, so I figured best thing to do was just let it satisfy its curiosity. Definitely caught me at a disadvantage though if it weren't in such a good mood.

It's been a banner year for wildlife in my yard. The place is lousy with snakes, more than I've ever seen. Families of possums, skunks, foxes, and raccoons hanging around. Beavers and otters cavorting in the pond. Earlier this week I was taking star pictures in my driveway and had a black bear walk over to see what I was up to. We coexisted peacefully for a bit until it made a bee-line for the garbage bin, then I shooed it off.

Yeah, there's a trade-off though as plants respond more vigorously to rain water vs. well or tap water. Rain has the benefit of natural nitrates, especially when accompanied by nitrogen-fixing lightning, as well as trace micronutrients picked up on the way down. Poor man's fertilizer. It also avoids the nasty salts delivered by softened water. You can sort of work around the latter handicap by testing and improving your soil's cation exchange capacity but I start to lose my bearings when delving that deep into the chemistry side of things.

The cucumber beetles came out with guns blazing this week so they've been my main adversary as of late. Also probably gonna need to copper fungicide my maters after this soupy weather. Love spending 500 man-hours and $1500 to grow $73 worth of produce.

Overwatering wouldn't cause instant death like that unless the garden were literally submerged... you'd see yellowing and then stunted growth over the course of days and weeks. It's definitely toasty out but nothing we haven't seen yet, so it's also difficult to envision the brassicas just up and dying from heat without bolting first. Got any pix? What you describe is unfortunately consistent with cutworm activity. They feed at night, and the plants start wilting severely and suddenly on the next sunny day. Hopefully it's something else.

You're in a slightly better spot than me, but still not sure I would bank on nature's irrigation today if things are dry. We 0.04" probably. While the NAM is wet, check out the disparity between simu-radar and actual radar valid at 9 am. Abysmal.

2.56" here according to the tipper, grain of salt applied.

35 for a low. Nice job there by the GFS.

Not very much wiggle room at all in terms of frost tomorrow morning. Welcome to June.

76/71. My PWS may be a hair dewy but not by much if POU is at 70 and SWF 72. Gross!

From the "it could be worse" files, 97F in Montreal.

But yeah, I'm installing today. This sucks.