Summer's Final Friday Failure

Remember the replacement zucchini?  Well, it did eventually flower, and there seemed to be progress...

...until there just wasn't any progress.  They stayed looking like this for about 2 weeks, at which point, with a great sigh of resignation, I pulled the plants out of the ground.

So I planted some mystery seeds...

My mother-in-law received some seeds from a woman she used to work with.  One of these was for something called "Bitter Melon."  I Googled it and found that it is often found in Asian cuisine and is good for people with diabetes (it somehow regulates blood sugar, which seems a rather unique claim).

What I didn't Google, stupidly, until after the plants had started to grow, was "how to grow bitter melon."  Weeks after planting I learned that these things need scaffolding.  Right now there's only one plant that's grown to any significant size, and it is climbing the deer netting around our garden.

Given that it is recommended to grow these on overhead wooden lattice, I highly doubt the net is going to support the eventual weight of the fruits.  While I have no interest in building a scaffold, or investing much money and time into a plant that I have no idea if I will even use, I do plan to let this one grow and see what we can do to support it along the way (physically, not emotionally).  I am also not sure if we've planted it at the right time of year or if the cool weather of fall might end things prematurely.  I'm hoping it will make it, since I'm kind of interested to see what we end up with.

The melon itself is s funky-looking thing.  This is a very zoomed-in photo of one that is perhaps an inch and a half long right now.  It is one of several on the vine you see pictured above.  It seems like an ingredient straight off of Chopped.

sunday centerfold

After all the negativity of this past week, I thought I'd post some pretty photos of other sunflowers that are thriving! (these are about 3 feet tall, babies compared to the giant growing by our deck)

The sunflower incident

Over the past 2 weeks, the hits just kept on coming.  Things were looking up when we finally got some rain.  But... it was hard rain, with a lot of wind, and it sadly brought down our no-longer-flowerless sunflower.  I am not using "brought down" as a euphemism, either.  I went outside the morning after the storm to find the flower totally uprooted and laying horizontal in the driveway. 

By this time the flower was, no joke, close to 8 feet tall.  Because it appeared as though the roots were intact, I tried putting it back into the ground, shoveling some soil over the top and then watering it a little.  I also tied it to the deck railing to stabilize it.

2 weeks later, this is what's going on:

It looks sad, which is pretty much how I feel about the fate of our one-triumphant sunflower.