Well, my squash is growing like crazy, it and even managed for a bit to shade out the honeydew.
As my boyfriend and I are far more interested in honeydew than squash, we embarked on a campaign of hacking back the jungle of squash leaves to make sure our honeydew gets some sun.
So far, this has not had an adverse effect on the squash, and I’m pretty sure it won’t, given the hardiness of the plant. We’ve even harvested our first crookneck squash. Of course, we’re now a little worried that our honeydew was thriving because of the shade from the squash plant. We’ll see, I guess.
Our garden was a little neglected this past weekend because we went camping and couldn’t conduct our search-and-destroy mission on the aphids that feast on our tomatoes. But that little bit of benign neglect actually helped some of our other plants – namely our volunteers in containers.
While we still don’t know what most of them are, we did discover, upon our return, that three of them are basil plants. That’s perfect because whatever has been munching on our basil plants in the ground hasn’t stopped despite my threats of imminent death should I actually see the culprit. Apparently, members of the bug world don’t find me nearly as frightening as I find them.
Our other volunteers seem to be doing well, too. We have what I believe are watermelon, some possible bush beans and definitely some lettuce. I’ve read that lettuce is really easy to grow, and that it’s a good plant for kids because of its ease and the speed with which it grows. This knowledge has made me feel particularly sad, as I have planted lettuce seeds for the past four years or so and have never gotten more than the two initial leaves of the seedlings.
Even when I planted baby lettuce plants straight from the nursery, I was unsuccessful. I went to sleep one night, and when I woke up the next day, the plants had been devoured by aphids. But this time, the lettuce decided to come up on its own, and it has, for some reason, done really well.
I guess I should qualify that – it’s done really well for my garden. It’s a little spindly, and there aren’t as many leaves as you might expect on a full head of lettuce, and it’s certainly not enough to make a salad for even one person, but it’s better than only getting those first two seedling leaves.
The only problem is, I don’t have the heart to harvest it. What if I cut some leaves off, and the plant just dies? I don’t think I could do that to my first-ever successful lettuce-growing attempt.
At least it’s a fairly nice-looking plant.
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