Oops!

This happens to every gardener sometime.  You turn your back on a zucchini plant, or you just don't look closely enough (our case), and you have a monster squash (~8 pounds).  Even when so large it will not be all wasted because both the F1 and her Mother like to make zucchini bread.  Otherwise it gets sold to Elon Musk to use as his next space rocket.  For size comparison a standard 6" juvenile (about 5 oz.) squash was placed next to it A 25 fold enlargement in just a few days.  Gadzucchini!

Friday Fabulous Flower - Squashes & pumpkins

The Phactors went foraging for apples and squashes, and having said something about apples, here's a Friday fabulous flower offering about flowers at the stage of seed dispersal, fruits. And in this case some of the largest fruits, squashes.  All of these are in the genus Cucurbita, in one of four species. C. pepo, C. mixta, C. moshata, and C. maxima.  Don't ask TPP to sort all these varieties into the correct species for you, it isn't easy or logical in many respects because you can't really go by color or shape or size.  At any rate fruits of all four species are shown here, the rest is left to you.  A lot of genetic diversity is represented here, and yet only 4 species!  This pile of squashes can be seen at the Great Pumpkin Patch in Arthur, Illinois, though the end of October. No you can't have the big blue pumpkin at the bottom center; bad things will happen if you move it. You can also find seeds for most or all of these from Heritage Seeds at the same link.  They also have the best pumpkin ice cream, but you can't get it online. Our gardens are too small and too shady for squashes, so our supply of winter squash is purchased here. Bins and bins and bins of them, all labeled and sorted for their primary uses, some so big they are hard to lift.   

Friday Fabulous Flower - Squash

This squash vine is clamoring through a hosta bed next to the patio. No one planted any squashes any where near here, but the tree rats must have missed one of the seeds provided as winter fodder. Hostas have nice leaves, but these are long done flowering, so each morning the new squash flowers are quite cheerful. They open with the dawn and by midday they are wilted. Squashes are monoecious (one-house) plants meaning that they have separate flowers for producing pollen and for producing fruit and seed. This is a pollen flower and the anthers are fused into a central column where the pollen is presented as a pollinator reward. Oh, wait, that's a floral visitor, a potenial pollinator, emerging with a considerable dusting of pollen having pretty well cleaned this flower out. The stigma of fruiting flowers is quite similar but offers no reward, a case of deception. The flowers, both kinds, are edible and can be used in cooking, usually in the bud stage. Best squash dish TPP ever had was a squash blossom souffle in Italy.  

Lincolnland needs a state vegetable? Well, don't nominate a fruit!

When it comes to crops here in Lincolnland, there are two, maize and soybeans. In terms of value nothing else comes close. Some 4th graders decided that the state needed an official vegetable, and one of our legislators with nothing else to do decided to help, so they are nominating sweet corn as the state vegetable. Except of course, it's technically a fruit, an immature caryopsis with sugary endosperm, i.e., a cereal grain. It's hard to know if Lincolnland has any vegetables of note; maybe asparagus. Now of course this is a repeat of the all too annoying problem of usage versus botany. Tomatoes and cucumbers are fruits. And so are cereal grains. Now apparently our citizens each eat on average something like 50 lbs of sweet corn, but is that the weight at harvest?  As you know, you buy sweet corn by the ear (infructescence) and the husks and cob are not eaten and discarded, and you hardly know where to put a high carb "vegetable" like this in the food pyramid. And of course when you got 4th graders doing the voting it skews things a bit toward the tastes of a younger cohort. According to their criteria the state "vegetable" should probably be squash, marketed as canned "pumpkin", for which the state is actually famous (pumpkin capital of the USA) but does that bounce it back into the fruit category where it actually belongs?  Who knows. Go for it kids.

Pumpkin mosaic art

Well, it wouldn't be fall, the harvest season, or Halloween without some sort of pumpkin post, so here you go, a link to an article about the king of pumpkins (spoiler alert: it's a person.).  What a great idea using pumpkins to make mosaic pictures, if you have enough room, and enough pumpkins.  These are great especially the sauropod. 

Wilting squash plants

About this time every year, people's squash vines will often wilt, by day at first and then severely, sometimes just collapsing completely and suddenly.  The problem is quite simple: the interior of the vines are being eaten by the larvae of a day-flying moth (Melitta curcurbitae).  As the specific epithet suggests this insect is specific for cucurbits (Cucurbita): squashes & pumpkins (so not cucumbers or melons).  TPP usually applies an insecticide (cabaryl) once a week to just the stems and petiole bases from mid-June into early July, but this year my routine was not followed.  This keeps the insecticide away from flowers, fruit, and pollinators.  When the wilting just begins, sometimes you can split the stems of affected plants with a sharp, thin-bladed knife and kill the larva(e), and the plant may survive, but mostly it's too late.  If you notice small entry holes near the base of the stem a small stiff probe (paper clip, toothpick, etc.) can kill the very young larvae.  Having access to sciencey stuff, TPP once injected the center of the stem with a bit of insecticide above the entry hole, and this worked fine.  The thicker the vine, the more susceptible, so the bush varieties of squashes are much more vulnerable than the viny varieties. Some people just replant summer squashes in mid-June for a later crop.  The plants are just too small when the moths are actively reproducing.  The saddest case was some neighbor kids who had a nice pumpkin vine with some softball-sized fruits growing, but then their vine wilted and you just knew what you were going to find and that nothing could be done for their pumpkin.