Volunteer veggies

Think you're in control of your garden? You can squash those ideas right now.

By marthabuns

August 9, 2011 at 1:58PM
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Sometimes, gardens just have a mind of their own, and you just have to decide how much you mind. For instance, it turns out I'm growing, um, squash maybe?

I had a few week's gap when my only garden forays were to dash through the yard showering water at any plants not covered by an array of sprinklers. I'd take the time to fling the cucumber vines in the general direction of their trellis, but clearly wasn't paying close attention.

When I came up for air, I had time to realize that the vine growing up the other side of the A-frame trellis was no lemon cucumber. It had completely different, much larger leaves, and squash-type blossoms rather than small blooms.

I could pull the interloper, but I'm sufficiently curious to know what type of veggie it will turn out to be, so I'm letting it grow for now, and I'll try to train it up the trellis in a way that doesn't shade out the red cabbage too much.

With limited sunny vegetable space, I've stayed away from most space-intensive vine crops, especially since those are so plentiful and cheap at farmers markets. So I'm not up on my vine crop leaves enough to know what this is for certain. The leaves and blossoms look like a squash type to me, and compare to the leaves I find online, but does anyone care to guess which type based on these pictures? If it's a squash seed that didn't quite get composted, it could be one of a half dozen types, and depending on whether it was hybrid or heirloom, who knows what could turn out?

Further proof that you don't always get to reap what you sow (silly rabbits), and you don't always sow what you reap.

(The Minnesota Star Tribune)
about the writer

about the writer

marthabuns

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