Backyard melons

Well... Summer is peaking and the days are very very hot. The cats hang out where there is any breeze during the day, or just fall asleep along the corridors.

Oreo-chan having a look at the garden

The melon experiment is over for this year. The result, 7 or 8 small unripe melons, 4 normal size very sweet and tasty red melons and one huge melon still waiting on the vine. I am very excited about how that one will turn out. Not very good results, but it was my absolute first time and I made lots of mistakes. I gave the chilled unripe small melons to the chickens and they seemed to enjoy it in the heat.

They're not so picky

I saved some seeds from the very high quality melons we got for our furusato tax. Hopefully they will be ok for next year for second round of my melon challenge.
I got my finger out and went out and dug for a couple of hours at a time in the heat, and the result is that I have finished half of the backyard now.

Neat.

I plan to grow potatoes on the top level, to minimize weeds to start with and maybe enhance the soil quality. Not sure what to do with the second and third levels for autumn. Right now the melons are phasing out. Maybe more potatoes? hehe. The lower (forth from above) level is now de-weeded and mulched with leafs, and I have transplanted a dozen strawberry seedlings from my main area. It was originally thought to be flower level, but Chika said she prefers edibles. So do I. Of course we will have the occasional flower here and there to attract the bees and deter the pests but no special flower section. Lowest is the passion fruit that is climbing ever higher. It is almost as high as the second floor balcony floor now.
If you zoom in right into the center of the picture, you can spot the huge melon behind the trellis and leafs. I will take a proper picture later before harvesting it.