Vegetable Wrap-Up

 I cleaned up my single vegetable bed this week. I had planted broccoli, zucchini, cucumbers, beans, and chard. 

The broccoli was the star for the year. I had it tried once before, but the deer got to it and it was never appetizing. But this year, it was beautiful. I planted it in March, because it was the most interesting vegetable offered at Home Depot in my last shopping spree before locking down. After I harvested the main heads on each of the six plants, side shoots kept coming until sometime in  late July when I left it alone and the plants started to rot and die in the moisture and heat. I pulled the sad remnants out and tossed them.

The beans were a success, I guess. I planted two varieties from seed, and made three good harvests. Many of the plants were looking barely alive when I pulled them out just now, but I did get a sparse harvest off the dwindling plants. I’m not terribly enthusiastic because, unlike the broccoli, it wasn’t such a treat to eat them. I’m not sure I’ll give space to beans next year.

The cucumber was squeezed in where there really wasn’t room. I grew it up a trellis, and got one fruit. Then the plant died, possibly from my longtime and apparently still active zucchini curse. 

I squeezed the chard in between the broccoli and the zucchini, and got a meal‘s worth of leaves before they were overwhelmed by their neighbors. Definitely worth it. 

I planted maybe three different varieties of zucchini, both from plants and from seeds.  So far, I’ve harvested one single small zucchini. I have had a plethora of beautiful orange male zucchini blossoms, and few female ones. When I crawled around on the ground cleaning up the bed, several dead plants came away as I simply moved my hand along the ground. I tried to clean up all the dead and rotting matter, and it appears I may have a couple of actually (apparently) healthy zucchini plants in there. Except for some smallish basil plants on the edges, they are the only plants left in the bed and they seemed happy to be cleaned up and able to breathe freely. I discovered a female flower on one of the vines, and performed sex on it by dismembering a male blossom and smearing the pollen from the stamen on the hopefully receptive pistils. So maybe I’ll get a second zucchini! 

The dead squash and cucumbers probably were suffering from the squash vine borer- a drab moth that lays  its eggs on cucurbit vines. The caterpillars snack their way through the main stems of the plants, usually but not always killing the plant on their way. This has been the bane of my squash attempts, and I have never yet suffered from a surplus of zucchini. 

I have two cherry tomato plants in pots, and I continue to get a steady trickle of tomatoes. It would be more, but the deer have nibbled at them more than once, and they do not set fruit in the hottest weather.