And here we have a basketful of butternut squashes There are eight in the basket and probably as many (if not more) in among the vines that weren't caught up in the great powdery mildew debacle. These come from plants which have already died back having lost the battle against the mildew and as a result not all are as ripe as I'd have liked for storage. Still even those are certainly edible now.
It's odd that some plants were badly affected - mostly those in the back corner of the garden - while others simply shrugged it off and some responded well to the milk spray while those next to them didn't. We've had an unusually cool and humid summer - only a few hot spells when the temperature reached the high 30s instead of weeks of it. The climate has definitely changed over the past fifteen years and gardening is changing with it. If I want to keep my vegetable garden going I'll have to rethink my summer plantings for next year, I guess, and I'll have to find new ways and new places for plants susceptible to mildew. Where I've grown them successfully for so many years no longer seems suitable.
2 comments:
What a lot of squash. Not something Matt and I eat. We didn't get much squash in England whilst growing up (other than marrow) and just never got into it when we came here.
We like this one because it's more like pumpkin than squash. It's sometimes sold here as butternut pumpkin.
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