Alan

We harvested the first few ears of our miniature, multi-colored popcorn today. The bad news is that the summer squash has finally succumbed to powdery mildew.

Today we harvested our first kabocha squash, our first watermelon and our first serious batch of soybeans. If you look closely, you might find the one little sweet juicy delicious slice of watermelon that actually survived the ravages of hungry gardeners to make the harvest photo.

I picked 107 pods from this one soy plant – that’s about 321 delicious little edamame beans. I noticed that the roots of this plant were particularly loaded with nodules of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Examining other plants, it was consistent that the largest plants with the highest yield had more nodules on their roots. Do more nodules make the plant healthier, or do healthier plants support more nodules?

We know that summer squash grow so fast that if you miss one during harvest you’ll find a Moby Zuke in a few days. But I’m a left-brained geek who likes numbers, so I planted some reference sticks next to a young Zephyr on Saturday, August 4 and checked it four days later on August 8. It had just about doubled in length and more than tripled in girth, well on its way to blimpness. That’s how fast a summer squash can grow. I picked it immediately before it could scare any dogs or small children.

Horrible name, beautiful plant.

Amaranthus caudatus