#butternut pumpkins

[petula-xx]

LI'L PUNKIES

These wee little pumpkins look a bit like underfilled bean bags. Their vines did not survive long enough to let them fully develop.

So they're now inside on a sunny window sill and hopefully they will colour up enough to be tasty and useful.

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[petula-xx]

My sleeping army of Butternut Pumpkins.

I saved seed from only the best doers last season, stored them separately and labelled with info that will help me select and cross pollinate.

Free, open pollinated food seeds. Humanity's inheritance, protected and perpetuated by gardeners.

[petula-xx]

HAIL TO THE PUMPKINS!

This is a follow up from my post on December 19th 2017. On that day huge hail tore through my vegie patch and broke some pumpkin plants. I thought they were goners.

But what did those battered plants do? They responded by sending out multiple vines each and went on to become the most tenacious, vigorous and well producing pumpkin plants of the season. Here are their babies - 2.0kg and 1.9kg respectively.

The 2 kilo vine was originally a volunteer that sprung up in the wrong place and had to first survive me relocating it as a seedling. The 1.9 kilo vine was grown from seed saved from the best pumpkin I grew last year.

The genetics of these pumpkins are obviously perfectly suited to my conditions and they are tough survivors. These are the pumpkins I will be saving seed from and breeding with next season.

Hail to the pumpkins!

[gardeningkris]

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Hokay, where to start. The good news. Let's start with the good news. Counted up the pumpkins yesterday as promised: there were eight Butternuts, one Atlantic Giant, no Halloween Howdens yet, and 30 Golden Nuggets! That's 39 all up, plus two GNs already harvested, and there's still more flowers coming and at least another 2  or 3 months in the growing season. Today, I harvested another 4 GNs. Two intentionally, two unintentionally (more on that later). The four pumpkins came to just over 3kg together. In the photo below, from left to right, they weighed 950g, 855g, 776g, and 483g.

I also harvested another 600g of tomatoes yesterday, bringing them to a total of 2.4kg of fruit harvested so far. Most of them showed a little bit of damage, and none of them were fully ripe, but I'm taking the stance that it's better to ripen off-vine and actually get to keep the fruit, than to vine-ripen and lose them to those pesky rats! Also, we've had large amounts of rain in the last few days, after a week of me not watering at all, and I'm finding quite a few fruits are splitting due to the sudden influx of water. Ripening off-vine prevents additional moisture from getting to the fruit at a late stage of ripening.

I also spent some time on the poor neglected main garden yesterday, cutting away the overgrown buffalo grass that was working it's way sneakily into the garden. I harvested the first two sweet capsicums while I was there, seen with the tomatoes in the photo above. I staked the capsicum plants too, as they were struggling with the whole 'upright' thing (I assume this is due to the horrible clay soil they have been planted into -I think they've struggled to get their roots going any depth at all). I seem to have lost a few beetroot in the last week or so -I swear several more of them had survived than the four or five that are now visible. Oh well.

Also, when I got back the other day the first thing that stood out to me were the carrots! They are growing very happily indeed!

Now to the not-so-good news. I commented last update that the powdery mildew had worsened a little. Not too badly -if I hadn't treated them with milk before I left, the mildew would have spread much further. But it had spread, so I sprayed again with the milk and water 20% mixture (full fat milk this time). I also cut away the worst affected foliage, even if this unfortunately meant the leaves from the Halloween Howden and Atlantic Giant plants. There were also a few of the older leaves from the top of the Golden Nuggets, but I am more confident of the GNs ability to cope than with the giant pumpkins. Whilst spraying the patch as thoroughly as I could, I noticed the Butternuts that had been damaged by rats had some odd orange marks on them.  I later discovered a fourth Butternut -on the other side of the patch, had the orange marks covering about a third of it's surface! I've now checked all of them, and so far only those four are showing any marks. There are no similar discolourings on any of the GN pumpkins or the AG either. After a bit of googling, the closest explanation I can find is Black Rot. Very, very bad indeed. So far, none of my research has told me if there's anything I can do about it once it's taken hold. I'm not even sure if I should allow the pumpkins to continue growing, or if that will place my remaining healthy fruit at risk, but for now I'm leaving them be, just in case it's not Black Rot.

In the meantime, I've devised a way to get some of the pumpkins off the ground. The Butternut above is obviously affected worse where it touches the ground, and damp conditions will be conducive to any type of rot. Being off the ground will also help the pumpkins stay cleaner and allow light to reach further around the pumpkins, helping them to mature evenly. Even the GNs I harvested today have yellow skin where they were against the ground. So I went through the recyling and pulled out two egg cartons and some cardboard tubes. I cut them into pieces and put them under some of the pumpkins, like so:

I couldn't do it for all of them -there weren't enough bits of cardboard/carton, and also the older GN pumpkins are drying out around the stems and not as flexible as they used to be. That's how I managed to accidentally harvest two of the GNs -trying to slip a piece of cardboard under them, and they just snapped off the stem! Oops, what a shame. Now I'll have to eat them. What with rats, caterpillers, snails and slugs, powdery mildew, very hot days, and now some sort of pumpkin disease, I'm beginning to feel like it's an uphill battle! Additional note: Just as I was finishing this post, I went to call the cats in for dinner and my housemate's cat Chai refused to come, even though I could see her in the backyard. Turns out she had caught one of those pesky rats! Unfortunately it wasn't even close to dead, and Chai soon lost interest in playing with it (our cats have never been good at killing other wildlife, only playing with them). In the process of getting rid of it myself, the blasted thing bit me! Sigh. But at least it's gone and there is one less villian attacking my tomatoes!

[gardeningkris]

Back to the future! garden!

On the fourth day since I departed, I returned and hurried into the garden to assess the growth/damage/changes... First up, the Atlantic Giant is looking happy. It gained 3.1cm in length, and 6.3cm in circumference. The rats haven't touched it. It is perfectly formed and I couldn't expect anything more from it at present.

The Halloween Howdens have grown about a foot each, except one which has grown about two feet! They are starting to form female flowers -although I don't intend to pollinate any until they have grown well past the AG. They are an interesting shape -the flower is pointed like a typical pumpkin flower, but the fruit is almost a rounded rectangle.

The Golden Nuggets are doing well, and it appears I missed up to 4 or 5 new flowers opening yesterday and this morning. I'll do another total count of the pumpkins tomorrow I think. The first few fruits appear to be nearing maturity: the stems are looking quite dry now.

The Butternuts are still growing heartily too. Those that had been damaged by the rats don't appear to have been touched any further (although there were few signs that the rat poison left out had been touched either). Interestingly, the vine which has my biggest and best looking Butternut on it has put out two more fruits, within three feet. I'm considering pollinating one of them: the first fruit won't grow much bigger than it is now, I imagine, which will leave that vine free to pour it's energy into another fruit. And it's not January yet: still a fair number of months in the growing season. And they're such good-looking fruit:

To my surprise, I have found two rockmelons growing! Yaaaaaaay!! I can't remember if I pollinated them on the 22nd or 23rd of this month -I didn't mention them in the blog or take photos at the time because I didn't think pollination was likely to be successful. Turns out I was happily wrong! There are two large-marble-sized fruits. Fingers crossed I can finally see a melon through to maturity.

And still on the topic of melons: when I arrived home this afternoon, I found a female had just opened today, and was still open (thanks to the overcast day no doubt), so I pollinated it. Here's hoping it sets. Also, the fruit on the plant that has died from Sudden Wilt appeared to have swollen a little: measurements show a 5mm increase in length and 13mm increase in circumference. However, the plant has very few leaves left. I'm guessing it's putting the last of it's energy into the little fruit in the hopes of making it viable. Once the plant is completely dead I'll pick the fruit.

Final note from the compost heap: the powdery mildew problem has worsened in the back corner where conditions suit it best, primarily affecting the Halloween Howden plants. I'll be spraying again with milk in the morning in an attempt to curb it's growth. Thankfully other affected areas don't appear to have worsened.

Over in the back garden, the tomatoes were again attacked by the rats. Apparently the thorough chilli spray job I did the night I left didn't have much effect. Then again, it rained the day after that, so perhaps enough of the spray was washed off. Either way, I lost another 6 or 7 tomatoes to them. Several of the tomatoes had been eaten so thoroughly that only a stem with a bit of skin attached was left. Unfortunately my memory card is having issues and the right hand side of the image where those ones were was corrupted, so I can't show you just how thorough those troublesome rodents were! The almost-ripe and mostly-whole harvest was 850g worth still. The green tomato had split horizontally around the whole fruit! And all thats plenty enough for one day..

[gardeningkris]

Problems in the Patch

A belated update, as I was too busy and then too tired to write this up last night. Well, I posted on a gardening forum about the butternut problem, and almost immediately some bright spark had the answer: rats. I hadn't even thought about rats or mice, but the marks are certainly consistent with rats. And we saw some reasonably large rats running along the back fence last summer, so no doubt they're still in the area. And it explains why the pumpkins that are under cover are being attacked and not those in the open: Rats prefer to stay hidden! (It also explains a half eaten grosse lisse tomato I found the other day! The whole top half of the tomato had been eaten but it was still attached to the plant!) I don't like poison, and I'm not keen on putting it in my backyard, but I feared standard little mouse traps wouldn't do the job for rats, and besides, I need to hit more than one rat at a time. I'm going away for a few days over Christmas, which means I need to get them now! So last night I put out two mouse traps and four little bait packets. This morning I checked them (and removed them before the cats were allowed out) and neither of the mousetraps had been touched -but almost all the bait was gone! Of the four packs, only one had a few bits of bait left. That seems the way to go then. I'll buy more bait today. And I'll see if I can rig up some sort of container to put them in so that only small rodents can get to the boxes, and also to protect the boxes from the weather. That way I can safely leave the bait out over Christmas. Also, I didn't cover the pumpkins at all last night, but it looks like they were left in peace. Yay! I did destroy the little one with the worst damage though -I chopped it up and fed it to the worms. There's another baby butternut coming up on that vine, so I decided to nix the damaged fruit and go for the second one instead. Another problem in the pumpkin patch: I've been hit with powdery mildew. I first noticed spots a few days ago on just one leaf, and wondered if it was powdery mildew, but promptly forgot about it and didn't look it up. On Sunday I realised there were a number of affected leaves now showing, googled it for pictures to compare to and yep, powdery mildew it is. Solution isn't too difficult: spray with a mixture of 10% -20% milk, with water. Skim or full cream milk can be used, but the full cream tends to smell once it's baking in the sun, so I went with the skim. So last night I sprayed the pumpkin patch as throughly as I could with a little hand-held spray bottle.

More bad news: my little watermelon plant is not going so well, and the watermelon itself has stopped growing. A bit more googling: looks like a bad case of Sudden Wilt, which is a generic term for a plant that wilts without obvious cause, at or just after fruit set. There's nothing you can do about it. The only solution is prevention, in the form of ensuring your plant has good, strong, healthy roots before it gets to fruit set. So sadly, it looks like my watermelon dreams are coming to an end already.

In slightly happier news, I did undertake some preventative action today too. I made up a garlic spray and covered the tomato plants in it. I haven't seen any serious signs of reinfestation, but I'm not taking any chances! I did do a quick harvest before I started spraying: another 93g of cherry tomatoes. Unfortunately 3 of them had split. I need to make sure I'm not overwatering them! Or else just check and harvest more frequently. All of this spraying meant that I ended up smelling quite interesting myself: milk and garlic, mmmmm. Not to mention my hands were killing me from squeezing the handle on the spray bottle! And last but not least: I harvested my second Golden Nugget! I have been noticing that the stems of the pumpkins in the middle of the GN plants have been starting to dry up. I was feeling around amongst some of them on Sunday to see how dry they were, and one snapped cleanly off. So I baked it, whole, in the oven for two and a half hours on a low setting, and ta-da! Beautiful baked pumpkin. It was delicious. Unfortunately I didn't take a picture of it baked, but here is what it looked like upon harvest. A nice little 534g.

[gardeningkris]

Ahh pumpkins.

Just a few pumpkin notes today. Actually, they're yesterday's notes that I didn't get around to putting up til now. First off, the Atlantic Giant: after being away overnight, the difference in size was quite pronounced. It's definitely bigger than a ping-pong ball now. In the 48 hours since last measurements were taken, it had gained another 23mm in length and 46mm in circumference. The flower damage done after pollination has obviously made zero difference to the fruit. It looks healthy and perfectly formed.

I was also surprised to find that one of the butternuts had grown substantially while I was gone. This was already the biggest butternut I had so far, but then it went and got all muscley all of a sudden (must have been Thursday night's fertiliser!).

Also, a few days ago I noticed something had taken a bite out of one of the other butternuts. It was small, and looked like something with a sharp beak had taken a gouge out. I noticed a few little gouges like these last year and they never amounted to anything, so I assumed some parrot had probably taken a bite, decided they didn't like it, and left. Unfortunately this time they've come back for more. At least three of my butternuts have damage now, and the one attacked first has had much more done. Unfortunately I'm at a loss what to do about it. I'm thinking of setting up little netting 'tents' around them, so that (if it is a bird or similar size animal) the predator's can't get to the fruit.

Interestingly though, the big butternut pictured above is the most open -the fruits being attacked are well hidden amongst crowded foliage. And yet, the one above hasn't been touched! A bit odd. Makes me think perhaps it isn't a bird after all..

Any ideas as to what it could be would be much appreciated! (Ideas on what I should do to prevent further damage, and what I can do to help the butternut survive as a healthy fruit also needed!)