Foto Friday: A garden mystery, solved. 10 August 2007 10:11 am
Posted by Tracy in : CSA, garden, pictures, seasonality , trackbackSo before we went off on our mad crazy bike adventure at the end of June, I transplanted a bunch of little spaghetti squash starts into the garden, thinking that not all of them would survive. Ha, ha. Here’s the result:
I pruned them back to save the tomatoes, but I couldn’t resist leaving the tendril actually climbing through the snow pea trellis into our plum tree:
There’s another tendril growing towards the neighboring yard to the north, which I figure is just cutting out the middle step of giving away the extra squash, right? But there’s nothing mysterious about all that. What was mysterious, until very recently, was a volunteer squash plant that came up a few feet over from where I transplanted the spaghetti squash seedlings, among my carrots and garlic. On impulse, and again on the hilariously false assumption that my spaghetti squash wouldn’t take over the entire universe, I decided to let the mystery squash (or maybe cucumber) grow, just to see if it would survive, and what it would become. Here’s what it looked like a month ago:
I suspect this little critter came into being thanks to an undecomposed seed in my compost, and as it was within easy pollination distance of both the spaghetti squash and the cucumbers in the other bed, I was mostly just expecting weird mutant hybrid fruit, and so I watched with curiosity as the first of these formed a few weeks ago. When I checked on the mystery squash yesterday, however, it was a revelation:
Unless I’m very much mistaken, that’s a delicata, babies! And if it is in fact the offspring of our compost pile, that means it’s a direct descendant of one of our CSA winter squash, which means it will be delicious. Case closed. Yay garden!
Comments»
It looks like a pale, oval watermelon to me.
The more I grow (and eat) squash, the more I realize they’re just savory melons. And yet somehow I can’t stand melon, yet squash are one of my very favorite foods. Go figure. Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Delicata_Squash-small.jpg supports my hypothesis. Woo! Yum!
Oh, that’s so exciting! Delicata squash are yummy!