Squash, Figs, Melons, and More

LEON: We are writing this in June, and what a spring we had! It was great for gardeners and terrible for gardens. The soil is finally warm and everything is growing. In the Craven backyard, the sweet corn is tasseling, the tomatoes are ripening, the beans are blooming, and the watermelon vines are running out into the lawn.

Our only serious problem is with the squash, which Anne will tell you about presently. For now, I’ll let you know about a common squash pest: the squash stem borer is a little larva that feeds on the inside of the stem—usually down close to the ground—killing the plant from the ground up. The only good control method is planting early and hoping for luck. The mama moth looks a lot like a bee and feeds on the nectar and pollen of the squash flower. She then lays eggs, usually on a leaf close to the ground. The baby larva hatches and works its way into the main stem where it starts eating and growing larger. After it eats its fill, it crawls down into the ground and hibernates if the soil is too hot or too cold.

You might think that the way to control this little bug is to keep the squash plant covered with an insecticide designed to kill insects that feed on the pollen and nectar. However, the flowers won’t become pollinated and you won’t get any squash (though the plant will grow nicely), so obviously the chemical approach won’t work. Early planting is your best bet. Usually, we have a fairly cold winter and pretty good spring, so the larvae stay in the ground until the squash plant has grown and produced more squash than you need. After that, you don’t really care whether the plant is dying, and this is actually the best stage for controlling the little fellows. Pull the plant up and get rid of it before the larvae crawl out of the stem and into the ground. This will break the cycle—at least for your garden. Another option is to simply re-plant. In this hot weather the squash plant will grow fast, and you will have plenty of fruit before the next larvae grow up.

July is fig and watermelon time, so I want to say a little about both. My authority for both of these fruits is Charles Johnson, who worked with watermelons long ago and is still in charge of fig research at the Burden Research Center. Fig varieties taste differently and often ripen at different times. Because of our weird spring, figs are ripening late this year. One of our readers asked about finding new fig varieties, so you should all know that Charlie has about eighteen fig varieties growing at Burden and is planning to hold a fig variety and tasting session at Burden on July 13. Mark that on your calendar because it will be the best time to select your variety—and probably get a cutting to root if you’d like. Call the Burden Center a few days ahead of time as the day will depend a bit on the weather. (Please don’t go out there on a weekend and pick the ripe figs. Charlie is trying to keep yield records of the varieties for each year.)

Now for watermelons. Again, there are many varieties from which to choose. Back in the days we like to remember, breeders developed varieties with large melons and large seeds. With a big melon, you had to call the neighbors in to help you eat it, and we kids enjoyed having melon seed spitting contests. Today the market calls for smaller melons with seeds small enough to simply swallow.

These new, smaller melon varieties are what you can buy at the supermarket, all of them ripe or nearly so. So how does one select the right melon? This is important to those of us who are gourmets for “really ripe” melons. The grower often picks almost-ripe melons along with those that are ripe to the rind, so while grocery shopping revert to the old tried and true method: thumping it with your fist. The key is resonance; a ripe melon resonates and a green one sounds flat. Now for the standard you can use. If you form your lips into an oval and thump your cheek, that is the sound of a ripe melon. Thump your forehead, and that will give you the sound of a green melon. Now close your mouth and puff out your cheeks; thump them (with your finger) and you get the sound of an overripe melon.

Now for my advice to those of us who are armchair gardeners. It’s too hot to do anything this month. If you get up early some morning you might want to smooth off the rows, dig a furrow around four inches deep, and add some fertilizer. If you sent off a soil sample, the analysis will tell you how much fertilizer to add per row; otherwise, just guess. Your dream garden has rows about twenty feet long, so put a double handful per row. Then cover that up and let it soak in for the next month.

Sometime in August, you can decide whether you want to have a fall garden or just plant a cover crop until next spring. After a full summer with no plant cover, the soil organic matter may be low. I like to use crimson clover seeds, planted in September and watered well. The plants will grow nicely throughout the winter and make beautiful flowers in the early spring; then they will set seeds and die. This makes an excellent mulch that you can plant through in late spring. If you want to plant early crops, such as sweet corn, you can spray the clover or cut it off at the soil level and plant through the mulch. You aren’t really killing the plants—they were destined to die after blooming. Sweet corn is like that, too. After it tassels it will begin to die regardless of what you do.

ANNE: Leon explained the infamous squash stem borer, a pest we’ve unfortunately experienced in previous gardens. However, we recently discovered that what killed our squash this season was… an automatic irrigation system run amok. To be precise, the hose running through the squash bed had a large puncture wound that we only noticed during a recent test run. My husband, Michael, just happened to test the watering system one afternoon, and that’s when we saw the absolute deluge that our squash had been subjected to for who knows how long.  Luckily, the particular flow of the flood waters spared the squash’s bedmates, so our corn and carrots continue to thrive.

It’s more than a little annoying that the one vegetable that bit the dust this season is the one vegetable that our eighteen-month-old daughter will consistently eat. Friends, the girl loves squash; so we’ll just have to wait a bit longer for her to experience home-grown squash. She loves our cucumbers and alternatively refers to them as “cumbers” or “apples” while snacking. She’s still tight-lipped when it comes to “matos,” just like her mama. I didn’t accept tomatoes until I turned thirty, and even now I’m highly suspicious of them unless they’re from our own plants. When sweet Julia promptly ejects a bit of tomato she has mistakenly tasted, I rejoice a little inside. That’s my girl.

Leon’s Gardening Tips for July

July is going to be hot and you may be tired of gardening. Actually, there may not be much gardening left to do. As a general rule, the pollen of most vegetable plants will die if the temperature hits around ninety degrees. The plants will flower but won’t produce any fruit. Pull up the plants that are about gone but remember to fight the weeds. Weeds are easier to kill when they are small, use a hoe or simply spray them. Don’t let weeds get large enough to produce seeds. They will make gardening more difficult next spring. Be thinking of what you want to plant in your fall garden.

With hot, dry weather the grass will wilt and look bad. If you water it in the late afternoon or early morning it will look better and you will have to mow it regularly. On the other hand, you could just let the grass suffer along with the rest of us. It won’t die unless the drought is awful. I hadn’t thought of this before, but a lot of football fields are sprayed with dyes that celebrate the school colors. Maybe you could spray the grass green until the drought ends.