A Really Small Farm

Beets

Cucuzzi!

It won’t be long now before I can harvest the first cucuzzi squash. I’m thinking it will taste better than the frost-nipped one I got last year. A few days of growth, a more little water and this and few more will find their way onto a dinner plate.

There are many flowers being produced everyday which is much better than last year or the year before when only one seed sprouted and then did nothing. The white flowers open late in the day and stay open all night. By mid-morning the next day they are withering. Even as they wither the flowers look interesting as the delicate tissue between the veins thins out and turns opaque.

Bumblebees (Bombus ternarius and B. vagans)

The milkweed plants in the rough areas outside of my gardens have been covered with bumble bees everyday for the past three weeks from sunrise to sunset. So far I have identified two bumblebee species, Bombus ternarius (top) and B. vagans (below), but there are at least two other species. Besides the bumblebees I have seen butterflies (monarchs, Milbert’s tortoiseshell, great spangled fritillary, dusky skipper), honeybees, and several species of the so-called solitary bees on the milkweed flowers.

First squash of the summer

Finally

Cucuzzi Squash Flower

One of my new squash varieties, the Cucuzzi Squash, has really put on a lot of growth. I tried growing this squash last year but it did not do well. The seeds were slow to sprout and the plants did not seem to recover from the struggle of germination. This year I had better success with germination. It was fast and almost 80%. Then the new plants put on growth just a little slower than the other squash varieties growing with it.

This morning while making my rounds in the gardens I saw two flowers on the Cucuzzi. They are staminate but when I looked more closely at the vines I could see many small pistillate flowers forming. Pistillate flowers are the ones that will become fruit if pollinated by the staminate flower. That's where the bees come in and there were plenty of them out and about, too.

Although it is called a squash Cucuzzi is really an edible variety of the birdhouse gourd Lagenaria siceraria. The fruits are elongate and are eaten when between eight and ten inches long. They can be cooked like summer squash. Allowed to grow larger they will become huge bean pod-shaped gourds.

Pollinators

Companion Plants

The East Garden

This is my east garden which, in 2010, was a fallow hay-field with miserable pale brown soil that grew daisies and stunted grass. Since them I've added tons of moldy rotten hay, biomass from vetch and rye cover crops, and bedding with manure from my sheep sheds. The soil is still stony but the texture has become crumbly and the color much darker, sure signs of increased organic matter.

The view in the picture is looking south at the winter squash trellis and the Painted Mountain Corn. To right of the corn is a strip of yellow mustard, buckwheat and vetch planted to feed pollinating insects. In the foreground and out of focus are other crops: more squash on the right, shell and drying beans, tomatillos, mixed varieties of beets, amaranth, and Zebulon sunflowers.

The garlic has been harvested and in their place I have transplanted most of the broccoli and cauliflower, about 75 plants so far, that I started earlier. Once the onions are harvested I will be transplanting more broccoli and cauliflower and some small cabbages that might do better if they had some room. There is also a potato patch about 100 feet long by 12 feet wide and strip of Kamut wheat. Along the east side of the garden is a wide strip of vetch planted for the bumblebees and other pollinators and as a larval food plant for the clouded sulfur butterfly (Colias philodice) and the alfalfa butterfly (C. eurytheme).

Nantes Carrots and Cicoria di Chiavari

This year I planted more carrots than last year in three rows for a total of about 120 feet. One row did poorly but the other two are looking good. The plants are getting crowded so I'm thinning them for better production.

Potato Flowers

Although potatoes are grown for their starch tubers they also have some very nice above ground features. The flowers, for example, are large, showy, and often colorful. I have noticed that potato varieties with pigmented tubers often have flowers of similar color. Blue potatoes will have blue flowers, red potatoes pink flowers, and white potatoes white flowers. So far I have not seen yellow flowers on yellow potatoes, just white. The flowers of potatoes are fragrant, too, smelling a little like petunia and tobacco leaf.

American Toad (Bufo americana)

One of the best insect eaters in the garden, a healthy full-sized American toad eats about 1.12 grams of insects each day. Depending on the size of the insects eaten that could be as many as 1,000 insects.

You can encourage toads in your garden by placing small pieces of wood or rocks along the edges where they can hide during the day. Mulch also provides good hiding places. Toads cannot drink water but can absorb it through their skins so a shallow saucer of water in a shaded spot is good for them. Change the water every few days so it does not become stagnant.

Toads breed in shallow ponds and other wetlands with standing water. Protecting wetlands from pollution and destruction will ensure that toad (and frogs, too) do not decline in population size.

Stick Logging

I’m getting closer to finishing the squash trellis and not a moment too soon as the plants are at the stage where they are ready to vine. Yesterday I cut 10 more balsam fir that are about the right diameter to use as poles on the trellis. These need to be trimmed of small branches and cut to length before I haul them to the garden. I also hauled in eight 12-feet long poles (the ones in the photo) that had been cut and trimmed the day before. Then I cut a few more very short and spindly sapling firs (size, not age as most of these are 10 or more years old) for stakes. When the temperatures cooled down a bit in the late afternoon I attached the poles to the trellis frame using wood screws. The whole thing is looking good.