I mean, we had hopes of hauling out some serious poundage of pumpkins. We just weren’t sure it would actually play out - would the plants survive the transplant shock to the exposed, sloping field with heavy clay? Would groundhogs keep the plants from thriving? Would the abundant vines start fruiting before the bugs won out?
Early on, the Blue Hubbard and Red Kuri had a serious headstart despite being planted only a week before the rest. We went ahead and tried out eating some Red Kuri squash before it had hardened/fully-ripened and it was great on the grill!
Eating the Red Kuri as a pseudo-summer squash
A pollinated Blue Hubbard blossom, early on (these things got to be more than 12” long!)
Blue Hubbard check-in. Bigger, but still green and growing!
Compared to the images in the last post (from July 26), the pumpkin patch expanse become an entirely different creature than the nicely distinct plants and varieties as we planted them. Gone was any sense of row paths, gone was the hope of mowing the edges of the field to keep it more walkable, gone was any predictability about what squash or pumpkin would fruit up where, since the vines had criss-crossed each other so thoroughly.
Unlike the rest of the squash vines sporting yellow flowers, these fuzzy Birdhouse Gourd vines have white flowers (that mostly only open in the evening)
Young butternut squash
Young Connecticut Field Pumpkin
By the 3rd week of August or so the vines of at least our earliest planted squash were starting to die back and allow the squash themselves to be super conspicuous, so we decided it was time to go ahead and get that first round out of the field and into the barn before curious taste-testers started to show up to the scene.
Our first wheelbarrow-full, at the very end of August
It is seeming like the most prolific are the Birdhouse Gourd plants - which are unfortunately…
1. decorative and inedible
2. the only variety I am also growing at home in my backyard garden.
..but they are totally impressive.
We are letting the squash finish curing in the barn, on a shelf that was already covered in straw to give them a nice place to dry out. They would probably do better to be out in the sunlight a little longer as they cure, but we can’t take the critter risk!
Second wheelbarrow full, less than a week later! This time featuring butternut squash, spaghetti squash and Seminole pumpkins. Definitely all on the green side, but these were all swarmed with squash bugs so we figured they would have better luck in the barn.
I wish we had a scale to get a good measure of what our yield was for each variety, but we certainly got a haul! We started with 5-6 plants each of the different varieties, and lost just a couple to squash vine borers in late July.
Pests/Challenges:
Some of the vines were very heavily chewed - presumably by the rabbits we saw running in and out of the jungle
No groundhogs after all!
Squash vine borers got into about 2/3 of the plants by mid-July. We had to cut them out of the stems in several rounds and it definitely took the plants down some notches - a few didn’t recover.
Squash bugs like I have never seen before took over by the start of August. We didn’t even try to stop them - handpicking has been my usual attack at home, but that wasn’t an option at this scale. By the time they were pressing hard, so much of the fruit was already set and looking pretty good, so we just let it happen.
We even got away with a trip away in the middle of August with no one to water/tend the garden at all, thanks to a couple pretty serious rain storms. My dad did a great job keep the plants watered for all the other weeks of the hot, dry summer. I saw some pretty happy mushrooms tucked up under the vines at the plant stems in a bunch of spots!