Squash Update

So the truth is that I'm kind of in love with squash plants.  I love the way the bees buzz all over them.  I love the flowers, I love the fruit, I love the vines.  They crawl all over the garden and we have to leap frog over a lot of them but I don't care.   They make me happy.

This is winter squash Black Futsu with yesterday's flower, today's flower and tomorrow's from right to left.   It made me laugh. 

This is a baby Queensland Blue [left] and a baby Golden Hubbard [right].   They're a bit bigger than your fist in this pic, but they'll get a LOT bigger before they're done.   The QB will turn a lovely blue gray and the GH will turn a screaming traffic cone orange when they're ripe. 

And as always, I let a couple of  volunteer mystery squash stay this year.   This one is nice and smooth and regular and pretty pale.   Maybe another batch of the little white pumpkins that seem to volunteer so well in the chicken dirt?    I hope so - they make adorable decorations. 

Winter Gourds

Remember those weird warty stripey squash that I grew last year?   They grew up to be tan?   And then they were inedible.

So, I suspected they might be gourds.

And to test my theory, I left them outside on the patio table all winter long.

Do you know what happens to gourds when you leave them over winter?   They get nasty and moldy and eeww - but that's normal because then they get a hard shell that you can cut into to make birdhouses or not cut into and make shakers.

It's what rurified people do on the weekends. 

So I wanted to see if my weird warty stripey inedible tan squash would act like gourds and do the winter moldy eeww thing and get hard shells.    Because then I would know that they were gourds.

So I left them out all winter and they did get moldy and eeww, with hard shells.

And now I know.    They were gourds.

I'll scrub them up a bit and see if they'll make good birdhouses.   That'd be totally cute.

Volunteer Squash - Ripe

We throw all of our veg type kitchen scraps to the chickens, who eat them and churn them up into black gold for the garden.    Chicken dirt is a miracle.

But loaded in that chicken dirt are a lot of seeds and so we get some volunteers.   This year we got a lot of tomato volunteers and squash volunteers.    I kept four of the squash volunteers and this is what they finally turned into.

This is a regular old butternut squash.  The regular color, the regular size.   Easy to identify.  

And these started out as tiny white pumpkins - only as they aged they turned a creamy yellow.   Very pretty. 

And this is a beautiful little white pumpkin.  I started out with half a dozen, but they were really susceptible to rot and the rest of them rotted.   Darn.   They were really cute. 

Then there are these.    This warty thing is about the same size as the white pumpkin.  I got four of them.   They were distinctly striped on the plant, then the stripes disappeared and they turned beige.   After I harvested them and they sat for a while curing, the stripes came back.   Weird.   They grew in full sun and I'm curing them under a tree - maybe the sun vs. shade has something to do with it.   I hope they taste good because even though they're really kind of strange looking, I find them entirely enchanting.  

Volunteer Squash #3 and #4

As I've told you before, I left a few volunteer squash in the gardens to see what they would grow up to be.    I had a tiny white pumpkin [which succumbed to the heat and a vine borer, I believe.]  and a bigger white pumpkin.

These are volunteers #3 and #4.

#3 is some sort of warty green pumpkin. 

#4 is some kind of butternut squash. 

Here is what a riper version of #3 looks like [next to the white pumpkin that volunteered.]

The green pumpkin is getting oranger and oranger.   I'm wondering if the green stripes will disappear completely.

I must say that I've had a lot of fun with the volunteer squash and I'm getting things that I probably wouldn't have planted.   I'll definitely be doing this again next year.   I just need to find more room.

Volunteer Squash #2

I was delighted to find that one of my volunteers was a mini white pumpkin.   It set a dozen or so fruit before the heat got to it and did it in.   The last set of 105 degree days fried the poor thing. 

We were able to get about a dozen of them before it died.   I can't wait to use these for fall decorating. 

Volunteer Squash #1

I kept four of the volunteer squash that popped up in the garden early this year.    They all grew out of the chicken coop dirt and since we throw all the kitchen veg scraps in there, I had no idea what kind of squash it might turn out to be.

This is one of them.  

It's a medium sized white pumpkin - a little smaller than the size of your head.

We bought a couple of them for Halloween two years ago and tossed the remnants to the chickens.

So far I have 4 pumpkins ripening and the vine is getting longer, so I might have more.