Squash

I thought the summer squash by the front door was going to make it, but I was wrong.  It looks like the vine borers ate right through the stem and severed the entire plant:


The result:


Note for next year:  Try and be more vigilant about vine borers -- use the flashlight at night to try and find them inside the vine so that they can be killed right at the start. 

Now on to more positive things:   About a month or so we found a squash or melon plant growing right in the middle of the collards.  Not having any idea where it came from or what it could be, we left it alone.   As you can see below, the first fruit is starting to mature.  The vine looks a lot like a cucumber, but the fruit does not.  Not sure if this is a squash seed I dropped (the second picture shows a yellow fruit) or a melon seed from the compost.  Only time will tell.

After being so pleased with myself for training the Cantaloupe, Butternut Squash and Acorn squash plants to climb up the wood fence, I have to admin that maybe it was not the best idea.  As soon as the fruit started setting, the weight started to really pull the vines down.  I assumed that I would be able to just support the fruit with some netting or something, and this might have been true.   But now that the plants are so big it seems like a much better idea is to let the vines just climb on the concrete. 

Our neighbors have a similar setup, where they let the vines and the squash grow through their chain link fence so the fruit is on the outside of their fence.   I'm not sure if there are any negatives to letting the fruit grow on the cement, but I don't think there are.  The best part is that we are finally getting some squash.  They look awesome:

And the squash flowers are pretty awesome also.  Every time I look in the flowers, I see bees.  Actually now that I think about it, I never see honey bees.  Just these black bees and some bumble bees.