2012 Veg Garden Oddities

These two (four?) yellow straight neck squash grew on one plant from some of the first blossoms of the season. They were in fact four separate squashes and joined rather quickly. At first they were all about the same size but as time went by you can see that each pair had it's dominate member. I had intended to let these go to see how they would progress but the smaller of each set began to go soft.

2012 Veg Garden First Squash Blossom

I spotted this little guy on the 4th. The squashes took a little while to get going in our cool spring but we are in a bit of a sun belt here so finally they're growing into a little jungle. These are straight green and yellow squash and are on a 5 inch high flat top hill about 4x5 in the center of a larger patch about 10x10. On the other side of the path are the volunteer crooked necks from last year along with pumpkin from seed and a butternut squash I picked up for $.89 from the garden store's sale table. They are not on mounds and are not as vigorous as the summer cousins. This week we are expecting our first stretch of 80 degree weather so that may change soon.

2012 Veg Garden Volunteers.

One small piece of summer squash can contain 50-100 seeds. We apparently missed some during fall cleanup as this volunteer squash patch proves. So far we have volunteer broccoli, squash and 2 varieties of lettuce from last year. Fortunately we are going for a 'live green' mulch this year to keep weeds down so a little more chaos won't hurt anything.