Growing Squash

Growing squash, comes in a variety of types and sizes, some to be planted in your vegetable garden in the summer and others in the winter.

The summer type squash is picked before it matures and turns to seeds. The winter type is allowed to mature. The fruit turns to seed but there is also a large amount of edible flesh with the fruit.

My favorite is yellow summer crookneck. Picked young and tender, it tastes great in the skillet with a little butter, salt and pepper.

My wife and I love it but my children hate it. I look at it as a luxury fruit. It is generally expensive in the store.

For some reason I have had a hard time growing the yellow fruits here in San Antonio. The plants are always big and full but the fruit fails to produce.

This year I will keep a special eye on it and track it to see what the problem is.

Zucchini is also in this category. I love it as well. These two can be eaten raw, but are better if they are cooked a little. We do not want to cook them a lot because then they turn soggy.

The summer types are ready in about 48 days while the winter type takes up to 78 days to grow. We will only be planting the summer type.

It will grow in your vegetable garden in full sunlight or shaded by another crop like corn which I am not growing.

It does not like the cold but will do okay unless the temperature gets below 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

They like a soil pH of 5.5 to 6.8.

Plant seeds in hills of 3 to four per hill in your vegetable garden. This is a vine plant so it is going to grow everywhere. If you want, it can be put on a trellis.

If you are planting corn, then you can plant squash and pole beans with the corn. They will grow up the corn stalk.

The flowers are good to eat however I have never eaten any and if you take out too many of them, then the plants will not produce fruit.

Bugs are going to attack the growing squash. This fruit is one thing I have grown that the bugs always attack. They attack the fruit or the vine.

This time I am going to put down some sticky glue traps on the ground under the plants. I will do this so that the bees do not get trapped.

It is suggested to plant radishes with the plants to help ward off bugs. I will get some radish seeds to we can try this.

(I bought the seeds and now I cannot find them but so far my plants have been bug free.)

Below is a video on how to hand pollinate squash.

The plants have male and female flowers and they have to be pollinated just right to get pregnant when growing squash fruits.

2-21-09

I decided to build some hills where I am going to put the greenhouse eventually. I build some dirt mounds, watered them down and planted some cucumber seeds in them as well.

Then I put a heavy coat of mulch all around the hills to protect them from erosion from the rain storms we will be getting shortly. I used to have some nice grass growing here, but in the five years that I have been away my family let it die.

5-13-09

I have had so much squash that we had to come up with ways to eat it. I have given a lot to the neighbors. And the season has only begun.

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