Succession planting cucumbers and summer squash
This year, I
decided I was going to wean us off Bt even if it meant a
squashless season. Maybe it's a fluke, but we've actually had a
much better cucurbit year than ever before. My new secret is
succession planting.
Notice how the cucumber
vine on the left is starting to wither up? This time last year I
would have been pulling out my hair, but now I simply shrug my
shoulders and look at the bed of three week old cucumber plants nearly
ready to bloom. I plan to seed a third bed of cucumbers this week
so that we'll have a final glut of cucumbers around the end of August.
I did even better with
the summer squash. Our four spring plants gave us nearly two
gallons of fruits to go in the freezer (with who knows how many eaten
and uncounted), but now the squash have collapsed into a mass of vine
borers, squash bugs, and disease. No worries --- check out our
month-old youngsters who just gave us their first fruits. Again,
I've got more squash on my succession-planting list for this week to
take over when our second planting bites the dust.
To be fair, succession
planting isn't my only innovation this year. I'm growing a different variety
of cucumber (Diamant)
and of summer squash (Butterstick Hybrid.) I also gave our
cucurbits quite a bit of extra compost so that they'd grow quickly and
give us produce before disease and pests struck. And the weather
has been perfect --- droughty weather with us irrigating
regularly. Still, I think succession planting has been key in
this year's success, and I suggest giving it a try before spraying Bt.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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