[Ellendra]

Last weekend's harvest:


Plus the last of the summer squash:


And the "Pile O' Squash" as it stands today:


That's about a third of the garden harvested. The corn needs longer, the T-squash and cucuzzi aren't quite ready yet, and I ran out of room on the sled for the red kuri and the rest of the pumpkins.

I'm a little worried about my corn. The DE I sprinkled into the ears seems to have worked, but now the ears are trapping water inside them. I'm seriously considering getting some cheap socks to put over them to kind of direct some of the rain elsewhere, but that would also slow evaporation and might make things worse. Maybe I should just grow one type of corn per year so I can harvest in the summer when it dries easily.

I'm still battling the mice for my chickpea pods. They've been winning so far, but I'm wrapping the latest pods in row-cover cloth and scattering mothballs around underneath them. If I get 10 seeds out of this, I'll be happy. But those mice are persistant.

The potato bed right next to the chickpeas is ready to dig up. I wonder if that will disturb the mice enough that they move elsewhere? Especially if I have my kitty supervising?

I got some lab equipment from Amazon this week. I'm going to see if I can sell herbal preparations and distillates in addition to my seeds. I even have an idea for my first product: a cat shampoo scented with catnip oil!

[greeneyes]

Thanks for posting the pictures. That's some nice looking harvest. Never had any problems with mice in the garden, but this is the time of the year that they always start to migrate from the field to the house.

They die pretty quickly. We had our house treated shortly after we built it mainly for termite prevention, since we were using a lot of wood in the fireplaces and wood stoves.

I don't remember exactly what they used maybe chlordane , but for 30 years we had almost zero spiders, insects, and the mice all died. Unfortunately, so did the hamsters, if they got loose from the cage and onto the floor.

Now, we have spiders and other bugs especially crickets, but the mice still don't live very long when they come in.