Green Melons

This time of year is all about bringing in the harvest. After dinner Friday night, I cleaned the apples off the Red Wealthy tree. I am a bit concerned about bears raiding the orchard, and the trees are small enough yet that a very determined bear could push one over, or at least pull down several branches. We have two loaded Honeycrisp trees, but those apples need another week or two to ripen.

Yesterday morning, I hauled in a wagon load of tomatoes:

That Little Tykes wagon has really come in handy, LOL.

I take the tomatoes off the vines as soon as I see any red and bring them inside to finish ripening. Too many animals like to take a bite out of one and leave it to rot. (I am looking at you, turkeys.) I’ve already put about 10 bags of ripe tomatoes in the freezer.

Note to self: Aunt Gladys and Cherokee Chocolate tomatoes are going into permanent rotation.

I spotted two ripe cantaloupes, so I brought those in, too. I always grow Minnesota Midget melons. They are the only ones that ripen reliably. I had a bit of a surprise when I cut into the first one, though. It wasn’t orange inside:

At first I thought it wasn’t ripe, but I tasted it and it was delicious. And the weird thing is that is tasted like cantaloupe, not muskmelon.

I have noticed, over the past couple of seasons, that seeds aren’t always breeding true to what is on the package. Peppers were a huge problem two years ago. I planted what I thought were green bell peppers—according to the label—and got hot yellow banana peppers instead. I’m not sure what is going on. I’d keep the seeds from these, but squash and melons are notorious for cross-pollinating and who knows what would grow out of them.

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I’ve been running out of supplies in the middle of projects lately and it’s very annoying. I had an hour yesterday to work on something, so I started quilting the background of the table runner. I have to say, this is the nicest swirl quilting I’ve ever done:

However, I ran out of bobbin thread and discovered that I must have used up my spool of light gray thread on another project. I have a lot of thread, but do you think I could find another spool of light gray thread? Nope. So this project also has stalled until I can get to the store. I probably could have finished the quilting yesterday and gotten the binding attached if I had had more gray thread.

And this is why I keep a lot of supplies on hand. I like projects to roll smoothly through the pipeline.

I think I may start working on the Upton dress from Cashmerette. I’ll at least make a muslin of the bodice to see if I have to make any adjustments. I shouldn’t have to, because the full bust adjustment is baked into the pattern, but we’ll find out.