this saturday morning was a community garden work day between 9-11am. i was the first to arrive even though i thought i was late. i checked in with anne marie and told her i'd be happy to dig out all the crab grass along the paths. i came to work, while others seemed to be there to socialize and say they were there. i saw one woman who seemed to be everywhere - even in the park behind the garden - but i hardly saw her doing any actual work. as more people started showing up, there was less crabgrass for me to dig up. gardeners also started ghosting, so by the time the work day officially drew to a close, i was amongst one of the few still remaining.

in belmont i continued with the garden work i'd been doing earlier this morning. being that it was saturday, i sprayed any fungal susceptible plants with a solution of serenade fungicide.

i stopped in the afternoon to have some cold green pea soup with apple sidra and some lychees my aunt had given my parents.

the buttercup squash plant along the shady south yard have already produced some large female flowers will could become good sized squashes if they get pollinated. the squashes growing along the western yard are making a lot of large leaves and at the tips of a feq squashes have formed some female flowers as well.

the buttercup squash growing on the western side of the yard have been busy sending out new vines. today i noticed one of them had snaked up into the nearby honeysuckles. not only that, but there are some female flowers. it's kind of the perfect place, up high on a natural bed of woody honeysuckle branches. the only downside is because it can't send out any additional roots, everything depends on the base vine. should something happen to at the bottom - say, a borer intrusion - the whole upper part of the vine will die, including any developing squashes. it's a risky gambit, but hopefully we can get some fruits out of it.

thus far there are two female flowers. they look healthy enough, with a protosquash underneath the flower bud.

the RB3 zucchini is doing okay, but i think there's just too much competition from the crowd of nearby hollyhock seedlings. we have some ripening cherry tomatoes: this year the plant that we got seem from mahoney's seems to produce rather large cherry fruits, size of a giant jawbreaker.

i returned home by 8pm. my google calendar reminded me there was a paid lantern festival on the charles river by the hatch shell. so instead of settling in for the evening, i told annie i was going out and rode the fuji bike to the longfellow bridge to see if i can get some good photos.

i first started by the banks of the charles river along memorial drive opposite the hatch shell. it was too far away so i changed location, biking to the middle of the longfellow bridge. the problem wasn't that i couldn't get a good view: there was no good views to be had. the event - first time - seemed to be a dud.

from the bridge i could barely make out a few lanterns floating on the river. the problem was the river is far too wide, and the lanterns seemed diminished when they're scattered around such a large body of water. people were also releasing their lanterns in stages, and there didn't seem to be a lot of them. there was a paddle boat in the water collecting the lanterns, which don't actually have a real candle but rather an LED one.

i came back home by 10pm.