In the Garden of Good and weEVILs III
Love what grows, hold no grudge against the dummies at the nursery
![Butternut-Waltham Squash Seeds | Baker Creek Seeds Butternut-Waltham Squash Seeds | Baker Creek Seeds](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd60cb0ad-64fb-4fde-96f4-1c115cf9fc33_855x855.webp)
In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good. Ecclesiastes 11:6
~see the first two installments: In the Garden of Good and WeEVILs I and II
When I receive His providence, I cannot be ungrateful for too much of one thing and not enough of another. I deserve nothing, after all. Still, I try to shape my garden to my will. Yet the world conspires against me. The result is a garden full of butternut squash.
Now, this is not all my fault. This stupid story started two months ago when my wife asked me to plant zucchini squash after a two-year hiatus. We have a vine borer problem here in Texas and I chemical not. I had to ensure none of their devil-spawn were lingering in the soil, so gave it a break.
Thinking I would get an early start on the inevitable vine-borer moths, which arrive in the heat, I bought a flat of zucchini, or what I thought was zucchini. Oh, they were all marked as zucchinis, of course. But one of the lingering and persistent after-effects of Covid is that bad quality control and dumb-assery abound.
Just as I was about to plant these “zucchinis” I noticed an army of sprouting cucumbers in last year’s cucumber bed. It was logical for me to assume this and a guy CAN’T get too many cucumbers in summer. So I put each one in a little planter and gently nurtured them.
Now just about all squashes and cucumbers look the same when they are little. I used to think cucumber tendrils were unique, but NOPE, lots of squash have similar tendrils. They are baby clones, until they ain’t!
Confident in myself, I went about setting up cucumber trellises, and preparing the “zucchini” beds.
Sucker.
Only THREE of the plants I bought from the nursery are actually zucchini! The other nine are butternut squash. On top of that, all the “cucumber” sprouts I saved are not cucumbers, but are ALSO, coincidentally, butternut squash! Theory: I often toss broken and rotten fruit-squash-leaves into a composting barrel. Sometimes I miss and things splatter or land in adjacent beds. I must have done that sometime last year.
Well, there must be 50 butternut squash on the vine now, and that isn’t counting the ones yet to come. But, you know what? I am not going to gripe. If there is one squash that is dummy proof, it is a butternut. Hard shelled, tasty, versatile, it is a squash that can keep on your counter for months, or in the freezer for a year.
As much as I want to be content, I must concede that one of the joys of gardening ( among many) is planting what the heck I WANTED TO PLANT. Dammit! But the Lord provideth and I need to shuteth up.
Anyone have any good recipes for butternut squash?
God said:
Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
BRING IT ON!
Ah, if only I had such garden problems as these. In my case, I can barely get kale to grow, let alone butternut squash. And we are at least a month away from having any harvestable vegetables. I know I must be doing something wrong. . . just can't figure out what. At least this year, I can recognize what's sprouted (unlike last year, when, well, nothing sprouted). Gotta love that Texas heat!
Last year, the Lord gave us so much rain all of the vegetables rotted and the flowers didn't do so well either, and all we had by the end of the season was onions, and we still have one left in the basement.
This year we planted zucchini, summer squash, two different tomatoes, just one cucumber plant, some bell peppers and rimmed the whole fenced-in area with onions and garlic, +2 blueberry bushes in the midst.
I did a bit of study into the whole zucchini and summer squash thing, and discovered that there are two different kinds of flowers, male and female. The male flowers appear at the end of a regular stem, whereas a female flower appears at the end of what looks like a tiny squash. So you need the male flowers to pollinate the female flowers. Well, all we got at the beginning was nothing but females, sort of like that castle in the Monty Python holy Grail movie. So a lot of these flowers were just curling up and little fake fruits were turning brown, and now all of a sudden we're getting male flowers. I've been doing what I call tickling the flowers using Q-tips. I'll stick the Q-tip into the male flower collecting the pollen and applying it to the female flowers and I go around painting every single flower by hand to try to get as many fruits as I can. The problem is now we've got like 20 or more fruits on each plant and I can't tell which ones are the good ones and which ones I should break off and throw away in order to conserve energy. Hopefully it'll become apparent soon. The onions are looking good. Thanks for your articles. Good stuff. And thanks for the song.