2015 winter squash harvest

C. maxima - Green Hokkaido

Harvest time! All of the C. maxima plants have succumbed to end-of-season downy mildew by now, stems on the fruits have corked up nicely, and skins have hardened and faded in colour, so last week it was time to bring in the majority of this year's winter squash. Most people will leave their winter squash out in the field as long as possible, but maxima squashes actually don't mind being harvested just a tad early, about 40-45 days after flowering. Since I've had some problems with theft in my allotment, I choose to err on the side of caution and bring in the winter squash when I feel they've matured. They're currently spread all over my living room so they can cure a bit, after which they're going to the (unheated) attic for long-term storage. Having them heaped together like that is always a very satisfying sight. Name me one other food that looks as beautiful!

C. maxima - Sweet Mama

Anyway, before I launch off into another winter squash rant, here is what this year's crop looks like. The first number is the amount of squash per variety, the number in brackets is the number of plants there were of each:

15 [8] Sweet Mama
3 [1] Burgess Buttercup
4 [4] Sweet Meat Oregon Homestead
2+1? [5] Marina di Chioggia
1 [1] Galeux d'Eysines
1 [1] Blue Ballet
1 [1] Green Hokkaido

C. maxima - Sweet Meat Oregon Homestead

That's 27 squash from 21 plants, which is ok but it could definitely be better. Even though I increased spacing from last year, I think the plants were still too close together, which tends to affect yields negatively. Especially against the fence, where the Marina di Chioggia were planted, the vines were just layered on top of each other. Next year I'll be increasing my spacing further to 2mx1m, hopefully this will make for healthier plants longer into autumn as well. Sweet Mama is a semi-bush variety that needs relatively little space, so it is no surprise that it did so well compared to the others. The +1? for Marina marks a squash that is still growing and that I'm not sure will mature in time. Of the other two Marina's, one somehow got detached from the vine before it was fully grown, so I baked it the other day. While it completely lacked the typical sweetness of a ripe Marina, the taste was surprisingly good. It was starchy yet flavourful, a bit nutty and at times tasted exactly like mashed potatoes with spinach (which is a fond childhood memory of mine, in case that analogy seemed a bit random). I had one more piece right out the fridge a few hours later and that reminded me of cheesecake, which I suppose was mostly due to the texture. Surprisingly good for an immature squash!

C. moschata - Longue de Nice

As I eat my way through the rest over the coming months, I'll be saving seed from the very best for next year. I'm already looking forward to growing them out... The C. moschata are still in the garden, they need somewhat longer to mature and in contrast to C. maxima should actually stay on the vine as long as possible. There's two Longue de Nice fruits that I believe are nearly mature, and then there are a bunch of Waltham Butternut and Long Island Cheese that only started flowering very late, so it's yet to be seen if I'll get a fully mature squash off either of those. The Longue de Nice was aborting a lot of fruit in the beginning of the season. Fruits would first grow very long (some grew to 40 cms) but the head (where the seed forms, to the left in the picture) would fail to bulk up, and then it would start rotting from the top down. I believe this was due to poor pollination (there were no male moschata flowers at that time), which might mean that the moschata didn't cross with the pepo after all (or they crossed but then aborted anyway). I'll save seed from any mature (and tasty) moschata that I get and trial it next year. If it's contaminated with C. pepo genes I'll drop it, otherwise I'll try to develop a C. moschata landrace as well.

I leave you with the biggest and most alien squash coming out of the garden this year:

C. maxima - Galeux d'Eysines

Batata anxiety

Mushemeza (left) and Sula 1 (right)

With just a few weeks left of sufficiently high soil temperatures, sweet potato anxiety is setting in. Harvest or no harvest, that's basically the question at the moment, I'm under no illusions that I will have a respectable yield at this point. May, June and July have been unseasonally cool here, but the weather did pick up a bit in August, so there has been quite a lot of top-growth over the past weeks. Nothing like last year though, when vines were all over the place. The slips that were planted at the end of May still seem to have an advantage over the others, even though temperatures were suboptimal at that time, so I might try to push the growing season a bit more next year. A plastic mulch would definitely have helped a lot with this kind of weather, but I've got excuses for not going down that path... I'm trying to evaluate possible cold-tolerance, plus I feel no desire to provide another feast for the resident vole population. In other words, I'll just have to suck it up and hope that some plants will at least provide me with some seedstock for next year.

Bunduguza (top) and Kwezi Kume (bottom)

As a gardener, of course, there's always additional reasons for anxiety, and I found some in the recent potato harvest. To accommodate for ever-expanding garden experiments I've taken on a second allotment this year, which had been lying fallow for a while and was pretty much covered with grass when I first dug it last autumn. I've planted both the potatoes and the sweet potatoes (as well as all the mauka, some mashua and all of the GOB oca) on this plot, only to discover recently that it's infested with wireworms. Wireworms are the larval stage of a number of beetles, which burry into all kinds of roots and make them susceptible to rot. They prefer the roots of various grasses and are therefore quite common in newly-dug gardens, but they usually hang around for a few years after the grasses have departed and in the absence of their favourite food they will devour just about any root they find. All of this year's potatoes have had some degree of wireworm damage, some being more hole than tuber. Since potatoes are a definite dietary improvement over grass roots, I can't really blame them, but the idea that wireworms might at this very moment be burrowing their way through an already scarce sweet potato crop, therefore diminishing its storability, fills me with insecticidal cravings. There's no wireworm problems in my first allotment, so my crop placement choices this year have been highly unfortunate to say the least.

It's not all misery and desperation though. So far I've counted 8 sweet potato varieties producing flowers. These are Murasaki, Georgia Jet, Bonita, Asian Yam, Kalebe, Burgundy, Nordic White and Nordic Purple. That comes down to 7 European/commercial varieties and 1 African variety, which is in line with what could be expected. Heirloom varieties seldom flower (at least outside of the tropics) because of a long history of vegetative propagation, while commercial varieties tend to descend from flowering plants simply because breeders need seeds to work with and thus select for florescence. That there's one African variety (Kalebe) flowering is quite exciting, so I'll try to pollinate it or at least keep it alive over winter if I don't get any roots. Possibly more varieties will follow as the days shorten (some sweet potatoes are daylight sensitive for flower induction). I'm seeing very few pollinators around the flowers, so of course there's no guarantee that there'll be seed. In fact, I've yet to see a seed pod forming, but I've marked some buds that didn't fall off immediately.. where there's ribbon there is hope! I might as well increase the hand pollinations too, I've had less time for that than I would have wished so far.

Kalebe flower

On a final note, I've recently been reading Ken Allan's excellent book 'Sweet Potatoes for the Home Garden; with Special Techniques for Northern Growers', which summarizes his experiences with growing sweet potatoes in Canada. Apart from repeatedly stressing the importance of using a plastic mulch to warm the soil (meh!), Ken recommends Georgia Jet as the variety of choice in colder climates. This was interesting to me because Georgia Jet by no means performed exceptionally well here last year. I got no roots at all and had to keep it alive as a cutting over winter, though admittedly I did plant it somewhat late. This year, Georgia Jet has been one of the least vigorous of all the varieties I planted. I don't know if this is because of the quality of the cutting, or because I maybe have a diseased specimen, but the two plants I have don't amount to more than a few spindly vines. It does, however, flower profusely. I've received my Georgia Jet from Frank van Keirsbilck, who has also been having some problems with it, so I was kind of bemused to read the lavish descriptions of Georgia Jet in Ken's book. Maybe I need to locate another source of it, just to give it another go.

I wouldn't mind that Indian summer now...