Little Squashes

Darla the Kitty Princess checks out a platter of summer squash in her flower border. Some of the ones she's looking over would qualify as "baby squash" - the kind I could never afford when I lived in Southern California and occasionally visited the upscale Irvine Ranch market.

I think the very cutest baby squashes are the scallop types (in white, all shades of green, pale yellow, deep yellow, rings,  stripes, and combinations) and the crooknecks. And "round zucchinis" have gone beyond the old European heirlooms and their progeny to standardized hybrids. They make for a fun picture arranged like billiard balls. But I'm not growing any of those this year.

Even though I've simplified our squash list, we've still got 8 plants of summer squash this year - way too many for one family, unless you plan on giving some away. Even if you give lots of squash away, you can be overwhelmed if you don't pick them young. The ones on the platter are:

Magda:   A pale green, fat Lebanese (Cousa) type bred in France. My favorite zucchini. First to produce this year, as usual.
Sweet Zuke:   Medium green with faint stripes, shaped something like the Cousa types when it gets bigger. I bought seeds for this variety as a darker companion to Magda. Tends to break at the neck when picked.
Spineless Beauty:   Zucchinis on a less-prickly, less-hairy plant. They're the ones in the photo with the blossoms still attached. How high-end is THAT? My favorite variety name for a "hairless" zucchini was "Kojac". This type really is more pleasant to pick than regular zucchini.
Meteor:   A deep yellow zucchini, very slim when young.  Apparently being dropped from production. Yellow zucchinis taste a lot more like green zucchini than like the yellow crooknecks and straightnecks. They probably have a different profile of phytonutrients than the green ones, so if you're a zucchini fan, growing both could be good for you.
Precious II:   A hybrid straightneck yellow squash which resists greening from a common squash virus.  They're the ones that look sort of like pale yellow bowling pins in the photo.
Zephyr:   The one in the photo that's yellow on top and pale green on the bottom. A unique squash bred by Johnny's Selected Seeds. Has a winter squash in its parentage, and is rather firm.  Nice flavor.  Reported to keep better in the fridge than most varieties.

I planted two plants each of Magda and Zephyr. Thought I had 9 plants in all, but the Butterstick I thought I planted turned out to be a melon. Maybe I'm a little crazy for planting so many. But the bounty doesn't last forever. Summer squashes tend to produce so much fruit that they seem to wear themselves out after a while.

In our yard, the yummy yellow squashes, both crookneck and straightneck, tend to succumb to disease and/or insects faster than the zucchini types. Here, it's possible to put in a fall crop of summer squash if the white flies and squash bugs aren't too bad and soil diseases don't get to the plants.

Recipes: Okie Squash and Tomatoes is a good recipe for people who are not wild about zucchini by itself. Skillet Lasagna with Shredded Zucchini works even for most people who don't like zucchini because of its texture.

Melons as Cucumbers? Plus: Apricots! and a Garden Update

MELONS AS CUCUMBERS
For me, part of the fun of gardening is doing a little experimentation.  Last year, I tried hybridizing a new melon variety:  Bidwell Casaba x Small Persian, to see if I would come up with anything close to a Crenshaw melon (the Crenshaw is reported to be derived from a Casaba and a Persian melon).  Maybe we'll see this summer.  Plants are in the ground along with some of our favorite melon varieties and a couple of new ones.

This year, I lost some of my cucumber seedlings to damping off fungus.  So on the cucumber trellis, I'm trying some melons which I plan to try harvesting as cucumbers. "Armenian Cucumbers" and related varieties like "Painted Serpent Cucumbers" are actually melons, after all. True cucumbers have a hard time producing palatable, non-bitter fruit here because of the heat and because it is hard to maintain an even water level in the soil. The variety Summer Dance is the best I've found so far here, and it must be grown vertically or in part shade in this climate. This year, I'm also giving a few other varieties a spot in the garden, in addition to the "melon as cuke" experiment. I'm not including Armenian, because of the folk tradition that growing it near regular melons will change their taste. Not sure it's true.  But why let this idea interfere with my experiment?

 One year, our late, great dog Sparky was trying to harvest a melon (Piel de Sapo type) and accidentally pulled up the whole plant.  He loved Summer Dance cucumbers, so I figured he mistook the melon for a cucumber.  We used some of the immature melons he pulled up with the plant like cucumbers (peeled and seeded).  They were sweeter than cucumbers, but quite similar. Our neighbor at the time told me that in the old days, his family ate immature honeydews as cucumbers. Yesterday, I planted out six varieties of melons on the cucumber trellis, along with a late planting of  "Summer Dance" cucumber and  "Poona Kheera (a brown-skinned cucumber from India). The melons are:

Honeydew Gold Rind: A honeydew melon which turns golden when ripe. Not too sweet, according to the description. From Willhite, 2005 seed. Pick on full slip if using as a melon.

Sprite: A crispy little white Asian melon. Tiny seeds from 1998 AND 2001. We'll see if they germinate.

Bartlett Hybrid honeydew from Burpee. 2007 seed. They've discontinued this one, which is why I got it on their bargain page in 2007. Supposed to taste like a Bartlett pear.

Lambkin: an early Piel de Sapo type hybrid with yellower skin. Kind of defeats the purpose of having a winter storage melon here if it matures early, so why not use as a cucumber?

Golden Crispy hybrid: another discontinued hybrid, not too different from this one. Crisp little melons are popular in Asia.

Gold Bar hybrid: Park bills this as the first cucumber/melon cross: a cross of Cucumis sativas (a cucumber) and Cucumis hystrix (a melon). But information I see on C. hystrix calls it the closest cousin to the cucumber. It's not a regular melon. It's hard to cross a cucumber with the melons we are familiar with. Even this cross-species "melon" has been hard for me to grown. Last chance for this batch of seeds.

Update: June 8, Lambkin and Summer Dance sprouted in their little seed protectors, which have now been removed Pictures of those later.

APRICOTS: We got our first apricot on June 2, a Royalty (not Royal). Second one yesterday.  Quality is much better than usual, probably due to the cooler weather this year. Not as mushy this year.  Maybe it's gotten less water during ripening than usual, too.  This is a really big apricot, and the fruits stayed on the tree in our recent windstorms (it's billed as a wind-resistant variety). I'm thinking that this is a good variety for the Salinas Valley.  It's a semi-freestone and there are other varieties out there which taste better.  But it's still an apricot.

Update:  On June 7, I picked our first Blenheim apricots which matured in reasonable weather.  No comparison with Royalty.  Blenheim's depth of flavor was remarkable, and its texture is far superior.  No wonder people go on orchard tours in the Santa Rosa Valley to taste it.  The variety Golden Sweet is said by Andy Mariani to be very similar, but more resistant to pitburn and brown rot.  I just have to convince a nursery to pick some up from the commercial vendor.  There should be some super-sweet varieties coming onto the nursery market soon, too.

I also picked a Harcot on June 8.  It was bigger than Blenheim, but not as big as Royalty.  Quality is much better than Royalty, not as good as Blenheim.  It's better suited to our climate, though.  Flavor Delight Aprium also has some ripe fruits.  Usually they ripen before or with Royalty.  They rank just under Harcot for flavor.  They're quite reliable here.

FRUIT TREES:  I finally got around to whitewashing the trunks of the new Pluot trees yesterday:  a Flavor King to replace the one Sparky's bathtub killed, a Flavor Grenade to replace the one Little Buddy chewed up when he was a puppy, and a Splash.  You're supposed to use a cheap white latex interior paint, diluted with an equal part of water.  I found a little jar of paint used for testing mixed paint colors which was perfect for this use.  I also renewed the whitewash on the cherry trees.

ONIONS AND LETTUCE: F. planted a bunch of seed for a short-day purple onion this spring, and they're bolting, so I advised him to dig them up. It's hard for him to understand that you plant some kinds of onions in spring and other kinds in fall. But he buries all onions so deep that they won't bulb up, anyway. These are woody, but he harvested and bunched them like scallions, anyway. Tied them with an onion stem.  He hates to waste food. We give him some space in the garden to grow the things he likes. He does better with tomatoes and winter squash than with onions. He also transplanted some lettuce a couple of weeks ago which was already too bitter to eat after a warm spell. He really hates waste, and I think he intended to grow it out for seed.  More seed than we could ever use. It's a pretty, but inferior, variety - a volunteer with tough, frilly leaves. I pulled them and put them in the compost bin so he wouldn't have to. There are still some in the front yard. He had started to transplant those to his garden plot, too. But I stopped him. Think I'll try to keep them from going to seed after they bloom. We have lots of lettuce seeds.

TOMATOES: I saw my first sphinx moth of the year last night. It's a shame that these fascinating moths lay eggs which turn into such destructive caterpillars. It will be time to break out the Bt spray (one of the most effective, specific biological insect controls around) soon, as the moths begin to lay eggs on the tomatoes. You can see the difference between a tobacco hornworm and a tomato hornworm if you scroll down here. I think the tobacco hornworm is more common in our garden. I only saw one of them on the tomatoes last year. Only sprayed Bt once. We also get the white-lined sphinx moth here. It's a beauty. According to Wikipedia, the caterpillars feed on tomatoes as well as a wide range of other plants. I'm not sure I've ever seen one on a tomato plant, though. Other sources don't seem to list tomato as a host. This is the green color variation of the caterpillar. Uncle Kent told us years ago about having to drive over a migration of green caterpillars in the Arizona desert. Guess it might have been these.

Our first tomato will be ripe soon. It's turning red. It's on an Early Girl plant we bought at a promotion at Home Depot in a gallon pot for about a dollar. The Ace we bought at the same time has good-sized fruit on it, too. I shaded the exposed ones yesterday with aluminum foil. Many of the other tomatoes bought as smaller plants also have fruit.

It's the fourth of June, and this is a late year for tomatoes here, but the fourth of June seems pretty early for a ripe tomato to people in most of the country.  The name of the Fourth of July tomato doesn't mean as much in areas like this as it does in the North, and it's not offered in nurseries here. I didn't grow it this year because I didn't start plants from seed. Tough skin, but does well in the heat here, becoming very sweet. But I may be planting Moravsky Div (Wonder of Moravia) as my really early tomato next year. Recommended by heirloom tomato expert Carolyn Male. Along with Bulgarian Triumph as a later, small, sweet tomato.

The lanky potato-leafed plant I bought as an Early Girl has largely recovered from its early sickly appearance and has some small fruits on it. Though the plant is not what you would call "lush" at this point. It's probably the maternal parent of Early Girl, which is reported to be a potato-leafed cultivar. There were lots of potato-leafed plants among the Early Girls at nurseries and box stores this year. Somebody left some self-pollenized tomatoes on the plant during production of the hybrid seeds, apparently. I'm surprised that this doesn't happen more often.