Independence Days Update

It’s been ages since I updated on how we were doing on the Independence Days Challenge. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to write about, it’s just that I’ve been too busy working on projects and getting chores done to write up all the things we’re doing. On the garden front we’ve been having a pretty good year. The zucinni and cucumbers are producing well, for the first time ever. Previously I’ve always had huge infestations of squash bugs, but this year all I’ve seen are parsitic wasps and hoverflys, happily eating anything that tries to eat my cucurbits. I think my eight layer cucumber system is working! This year I added my own compost, peat moss, lime, rabbit manure, leaves from last fall, mixed it all like a complicated cake recipie and topped it with a biodegradeable paper mulch which looks a lot like I’m laying out craft paper on top of my garden bed. Then I planted the cucumbers and zuchinni through the paper along with a couple of flowers and nasturiums. Then I made trellis hoops out of fencing to put between the cucumbers and lift them off of the ground entirely. It’s made for easy harvesting and checking for bugs and diseases. Then I covered the whole thing with a row cover until they started blooming. Somehow the squash vine borers still found them, but did less damage than usual. I have a hard time hating squash vine borers, they look like ancient japanese samuri.

Jerry’s been busy too, he put in this shelf that reminds us of telephone poles to give us more storage in our spare room. I’m still working on organizing everything. You can see my happy orange wall in the picture. I’m somewhat orange obsessed! We realized that almost every room in the house has some kind of furniture or storage that Jerry has built for us. Upstairs he built closests and built in bookshelves, downstairs he made a hutch for storing bins of grains the telephone pole shelves and a wall hanging shelf for my tinctures and esential oils. It’s good to have a handy man.

I also thought I’d share my adventures in hand polinating. This year we had a mystery squash grow in a rather poor garden bed that I was planning on mostly ignoring until next year. They mystery squash ignored the rocks and lack of water and thrived in our soil, so I decided that wanted to save seed from this mystery, in case the squash tasted as good as the vine looked. When a female blossom bloomed, I took off the flower part leaving what you see below.

You can tell it’s female from the bulb at the base and the large pollenless stamen in the middle of the flower. Then you take a male flower and using a paintbrush, cover the stamen with pollen.

Then to make sure there’s no cross pollination with other cucurbits, like zuchinni or cucumbers, you put a plastic bag over the flower until it starts to develop.

I’ll post more when we dare to taste the mystery squash.