Planning the Summer Garden

I'm rapidly eating my way through the spring's bounty.  There are a couple of carrots left from the winter planting, with new sprouts ready to take their place.  The last of the beets and fennel are maturing.  One fennel is bolting, so I'll keep it for this year's fennel seed.  I'm eating the rest of the radishes in the next post.  Basically, it's time for summer gourds and melons to sprout.

I planted the last of last year's pickling cucumber and watermelon seeds, just to see what would happen.  As expected, the germination rate was low.  I'll have some, but not a lot.  That left room for one more variety of something viney.  There weren't any pie pumpkin left, so I picked up butternut squash.

Butternut is considered a "winter" squash, part of the gourd family.  You grow it in the summer.  The Winter part is because it keeps.  Melons, you have to eat or they spoil.  Gourds, especially the hard-skinned ones, can be kept in a cool and dark place for several months.  That's how markets can supply them into the early summer, when the earliest of the new crops come.

Gourds are also dependent on warm soil to germinate, which is why I planted the melon family first.  It was cool all May, then warmed up last weekend.  It will cool down again, maybe next week, for June Gloom, but the soil is warm enough for something to come up.

The minimal research I did on butternut shows vines as elaborate as pumpkin.  The cucumber and watermelon produced surprisingly small leaves and flowers, so there should be room.  And I haven't forgotten that I'm allergic to gourd pollen.  Things are going to get sniffly in about a month.  However, I now have a deep fryer for stuffed blossoms.

I'm also taking advantage of the nice weather to transplant the strongest celery sprouts.  One survived out of the first two I took out a couple of months ago and is taking root.  Someone found the catnip I tried to hide in the tomato pot, so I'm going to wait a bit longer before putting those somewhere.

What I'm really hoping for with this diversity is not ending up with too much of any one thing.  Also, you don't have to worry about kids smashing a butternut on Halloween.  Nutritious vegetables would be the scariest part of any Halloween decoration.