Is your car unlocked? When you get home you’ll discover you have four squash, each as big as your head, under a towel on the back seat. I’m sorry. I had to hide them there. It was the only way for me to insist you take more than I already pressed on you when you arrived.
This is the GIGUNDO squash plant that volunteered in our compost pile two months ago.
And this is the 5-8 lb Italian heirloom squash we’re getting about 8-10 a day of. I carry them back to the house in a wheelbarrow.
Now I want you to know, I’m not complaining. They are the sweetest, tenderest squash we’ve ever grown. We saute them with butter, eat them raw in salad, and Patti suggested we puree them and freeze them to use as a soup base all winter. All good ideas. I will probably come up with more because I think right now we’ve got about 150 more in some stage of development and more beautiful golden blossoms coming out all the time.
Why so many? Here are the culprits.
Easy to see the first bee on the bottom covered in pollen. Then there’s the next bee deeper in, pollinating away. And way down under both of them, there’s a third bee. Each of them wearing enough pollen to decorate six more squash blossoms with. Yes, they are doing their job, and lined up to do it with every squash blossom that opens its petals. And that’s why we will probably harvest close to a half ton of squash this fall from ONE PLANT.
So come on over. Bring an appetite. I’ve got squash fritters frying up right now and I’m working on squash cookies. Or maybe a nice little squash gelato.
What? You can’t find your car keys? I can’t imagine where they might have gone. You search the kitchen while I dash out to the driveway to see if you dropped them there. Don’t come out unless I yell that I found them, okay?
warmly, Jacqueline