Scorched Earth

The last week was extremely dry and hot... Good thing I have the huge water tank, so I watered the whole garden twice and still got like 500 liters left. It's kind of a nice workout. If I get tired of it later on maybe I can design a water way that goes through the whole garden so I don't manually have to carry water.
Bad thing about the heat is that I could only spend maximum an hour a day digging in the backyard before feeling all dizzy and ready to pass out. So not much progress in that department.
Cicadas are crawling out. Here is one near the entrance.

The kittens had a lot of fun playing around with the empty husk

Near the entrance a huge lily has opened. I was super happy at first because I got the idea to plant lots of lilies at the strip near the entrance. Later I also thought I should mix them with daffodils. It will look and smell amazing. Today when looking up info about the flowers I saw that both lilies and daffodils are extremely poisonous to cats, so that's the end of that idea. Back to the drawing board.

Too bad. It smells like heaven and it is huge and beautiful. Oh well

Now I kind of wonder if the root cause of Chubby's kidney failure wasn't the lilies.... she loved to lick everything... so it is not so unlikely. Poor kitty. Although there were no lilies out when she got real ill, I heard about cats whose kidneys broke from lilies but who managed to still live normal a while before the symptoms showed.
Still, flowers would be nice to have there. It's not easily accessible and part shady so veggies would not be ideal. Maybe roses?
The kabocha are officially dead. And half the melon patch is also kind of dying... Saturday it still looked green but Monday suddenly it had turned all dry and yellow. I didn't over water the patch but didn't let it dry out neither. 

Well, it was just a first try so I was not expecting a huge success

I cleaned out the lower right side melon plant that turned all dry and dead. Basically picked off all the melons from it. Remember the three lower melons are the ones that looked like they were dying in the nursery. In fact they did much better than the others. So maybe the extra time in the nursery was good for them? Something to think about next time. Also that row only has 3 plans, while the above patch had 10 squeezed in there with netting etc. Plus the above row has got moles digging in it, so the roots are constantly fighting.
Anyway, the melons I picked are here. Opened the smallest one and it was very very sweet and also soft. Yum yum yum.

Still more melons are growing in the patch. The biggest out there is twice as big as the biggest here.