I’m jealous. Around here (Cleveland), we won’t be getting any until mid-July, at the earliest.
But it could be worse. When I lived in Montana, Early Girl, and some cherries, were the only varieties we could even fit into our short growing season.
We had squash first time last night. He hasn’t brought any more of those in today.
The tomatoes we can can or freeze what we cannot eat.
Squash don’t work out so good and we always have too much. We donate/give away what we can’t eat. But still it’s an over-abundance. Cukes and Zukes too.
You might try Porter or Porter Improved in the future. They’re smallish (ping-pong ball) sized pink tomatoes that were originally developed in Stephenville, TX, so they’re adapted for the heat around here. They’re pretty tasty and prolific.
Porters are really the only ones along with some of the cherry varieties that actually will set fruit after about the middle of June. The rest won’t set, and they all get early blight. It must blow through the air; even container plants that have been carefully managed to avoid contamination get it.
If the plants live, they’ll set again in September, and then it’s a race to see if they ripen before the first freeze.
I can’t raise cucurbits (nor can anyone else in the immediate neighborhood) because of something like that. I guess the ground is lousy with powdery mildew spores and as soon as anything susceptible gets growing good, it’s doomed. No amount of local drenching and spraying will prevent or help.
We’re lucky enough that if we plant the tomatoes in the second week of March or so, they’ll get big enough fast enough to put out a lot of tomatoes before the blight really kicks in.
Doesn’t seem to matter what I do; repeated and diligent spraying with mancozeb, chlorothalonil, or copper fungicide doesn’t seem to do much; maybe delay the full onset a bit, but that’s it.
For cucurbits, it’s totally cucumber beetles that are our biggest problem, except for summer squashes, and they get the vine borers something awful. But they’re like the tomatoes; usually you get a fair number of squash before the plants croak.
That sounds like over-ripe pickling cucumbers. We inadvertently planted pickling cucumbers last year and didn’t pick them because they were so small. They did get bigger, but by the time they did they were yellow and mostly flavorless.
May be. We save seeds and sometimes things get mixed up.
Actually I don’t think its possible for them to cross pollinate.
But the whole thing has fascinated the grand kids. They are doing research. That’s how I know they probably didn’t really “fall in love, get married and baby makes 3000”, cause my eldest grand-wrek told me so.
Mother Squash and Father Cucumber did not create Franken-veggie. It appears.
I’ve never found romas to be very good for eating raw… They always taste kind of bland and pasty to me. I’ve heard they’re meant for saucing; they might be good for that.
And I know that the taxonomists disagree, but I’m convinced that watermelons and cucumbers are closely related. Watermelons are bigger and sweeter, of course, but in nearly every other respect, they’re identical.
