Squash

This year when we did our compost pile we threw in a couple pumpkins from two different varieties and some Hubbard squash. We thought, with it being so cold, that all the seeds would be frozen. But come spring we saw patches like this picture below all over the garden where we had spread our compost.

My husband calls the plants that come up on their own “volunteers”. Which I have no doubt is a common term. I just wasn’t into gardening much before we moved here so I had never heard it. With all these volunteer squash plants we didn’t have to plant any of the pumpkin or squash seed we had purchased. We don’t really love eating squash anyway. Which is why they ended up in the compost pile in the first place. They are fun to grow though, because they get so big. I also really like to have them for fall decor.

We did want to move them though because they were not growing where we wanted them to. So we carefully dug them up, trying to leave the roots as intact as possible.

I also tried to group them together with similar plants based on their leaf shape. Some had longer leaves and some shorter. So I tried to put all the long ones together and all the roundish ones together.

We then set up an irrigation ditch around all the mounds so we could easily water them a row at a time, rather than as individual mounds.

The first week or two we also sprayed all the dirt around the newly transplanted seedlings so that the roots could get established enough to reach the water in the ditch.

After growing for a couple months this is what they look like.

It turns out that I didn’t do that great of a job of guessing which leaves were which. We ended up with two different varieties of pumpkin and some hubbard squash all mixed up together. Oh well, they don’t seem to mind. And we will have some nice Jack-o-lanters come October.

Now we actually have a bunch of pumpkins turning orange. Hopefully they will stay on the vine until closer to October. It is amazing how fast they grow!