#babayaga — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

aeshnid @[email protected] · 2026-07-25 · 12:18 UTC

Old tortie girl in her happy place.
#Caturday #CatsOfMastodon #BabaYaga #WitchyCat #Tortie #Teenagers

#caturday #catsofmastodon #babayaga #witchycat #tortie #teenagers

A Stone in the River @[email protected] · 2026-07-12 · 20:36 UTC

Abundant

Hello Friends!

These past two weeks have seen me spending all of my free time picking raspberries or working on a dharma talk for my sangha this last Thursday. Now I am busy in the garden and catching up with all the things I let slide.

A heat dome arrived today and we are under an excessive heat warning through at least July 14th. High heat and high humidity. I remember the good old days when I first moved to Minnesota in 1994. Summers then were so much cooler. More than five or six days of 90F/32C or higher heat was rare. Now I’m looking at 90F/32C or hotter for this entire week, and it isn’t even the first string of excessive heat days we’ve had. The climate is thoroughly broken.

There is no rain in the forecast, the heat dome is keeping the rain away, so I will need to hand water the garden from the rain barrels. That promises to be a sweaty affair.

The garden has thus far been abundant. Those raspberries:

We’ve had so many this year! We’re putting them in our morning porridge, smoothies, making small batch jam, and I donated some to my neighborhood food shelf (Have also donated a lot of arugula, some herbs and onions). And still the freezer is packed with them. The freezer is also packed with rhubarb. James is going to be doing some canning, but we are also considering a small chest freezer for the basement.

The peas were doing great this year until the first heat wave rolled through at the end of June and the peas decided it was too hot for them. The heat followed by rain nearly every day for over a week, kick started the rest of the garden though.

All the squashes are vining and flowering, the cucumbers are vining and starting to flower, the citron melons are vining but I haven’t seen flowers yet. And the beans! The pole beans have all reached the top of their trellises and are reaching for the sky. I’m picking a cereal bowl full of yellow wax beans nearly every day. All the cherry tomatoes are covered in fruit and I look at them daily, anticipating when they will be ripe. The other tomato plants have tiny fruit that will take a while yet because they are all paste and slicing tomatoes. I can hardly wait for the first bite of sandwich with a fresh from the garden slice of tomato on it. Mmmmm.

Tired of poles falling over during big thunderstorms, James and I built two sturdy arches this spring. I’ve got pole beans climbing up one side and winter squash climbing the other side:

I am pleased with them and I think I will add a third next spring. I took this photo a week ago. The beans and the squash are at the top of the arch today. The beans here are brown resilient beans. They began life four years ago as bush beans and last year they decided to revert to pole beans. The squash is green striped cushaw. I have not grown it before. The leaves are gigantic and so are the vines. Here’s some flowers and bees on the vine this morning:

The garden has also gifted me with a volunteer pumpkin. Last year I planted saved seeds from Naked Bear pumpkin I had grown the previous year, not realizing this variety of pepita pumpkin is a hybrid. I got one small pumpkin last summer whose seeds were regular seeds, not pepita seeds. It cooked up as a nice, not sweet, pumpkin. The vine also had a giant elongated pumpkin that a squirrel ripped apart just before it was ripe. The squirrel scattered some of the seeds, and one of them sprouted. The vine is vigorous and I have to keep redirecting it out of the garden path and away from a tomato plant. So far it has two pumpkins and I spied a third tiny one this morning:

I am strategizing on how I can protect them later in the season. I have no idea how big they will get, whether the seeds inside will be shell-free, or how sweet the flesh will be, but I look forward to finding out!

Here’s a couple big view photos of the garden this year I took about two weeks ago:

This year we’ve made milkweed flower jelly and daylily flower jelly. Both are delicate floral flavors that are lovely on toast made from, for example, this medjool date-sunflower-orange tea sourdough bread I baked:

Instead of using plain water in the recipe I made sweet orange tea and used the tea. So delicious! And now I am wondering what other teas might go good in various sourdough loaves. Whole wheat chai spice? Multigrain green tea? Cinnamon-raisin chamomile? It would be fun to try mint but I am not certain what bread I would pair it with, maybe a seedy Danish rye?

The chickens are doing great. Baba and Nanny are now three months old:

They have their big girl voices now, no more peeping. They are friendly and curious and will eat from my hand, which meant Baba got the huge grasshopper I caught this morning much to Sia’s chagrin. Sia is head chicken, for now. I suspect once the witches are full size, Baba will challenge Sia for top of the pecking order.

And there you have it. If it is hot where you are, stay safe and find somewhere cool to be. Take care everyone!

#BabaYaga #blackRaspberries #brownResilientBeans #cushawSquash #excessiveHeat #gardenArches #heatDome #NannyOgg #pumpkins #sourdough #yellowWaxBeans

#babayaga #blackraspberries #brownresilientbeans #cushawsquash #excessiveheat #gardenarches