Squash plants in June
I was at the point of asking the landlord whether I could use the cold frame as a strawberry bed next year, because the squash I’ve been growing there have done so poorly. Last year they just upped and died, and this year they went backwards after I’d planted them out and the slugs treated them as some sort of all-you-can-eat salad bar. I had one plant left from my original set of seedlings and it wasn’t looking too clever but it wasn’t quite dead so I bunged it in the cold frame anyway and decided to hope for the best.
It just Growed
Oh, and feed it coffee. We generate a lot of coffee grounds in the town mouse household and I’d read that they were good for the garden – anti slug, pro worm, full of nitrogen and generally all-round hot stuff. Some went on to my tomato plant – which has rewarded me with actually looking like it might produce some tomatoes this year – and the rest got spread around the ragged survivors of the squash slug massacre. I kept this up for a few weeks and it didn’t seem to do anything particularly miraculous so after a while I went back to putting the coffee in the compost as it was easier to deal with. And then the summer went a bit warm and wet and then – miraculously – dry and sunny and I got distracted with keeping up with the beans and the salad and the potatoes and there wasn’t much reason to spend much time looking at the cold frame except to note that the not-dead-yet squash plant was still not dead and in fact looking a little less sickly.
Ready to pick?
And then yesterday I decided to have a proper look and holy buckets, that squash plant has been growing and growing and growing. And not only that, it’s been fruiting too. In fact, that one there might actually be ready, if you believe the internet. Could it be that I’ll actually finally get some squash to eat out of this garden?
I don’t know whether it truly was the coffee grounds, or just the weather and good luck, that made the difference. But I think I’ll be saving the stuff from the cafetiere for my plants again next year. Unless, of course, we finally get to taste the stuff and discover that we’ve inadvertently invented the ‘squashaccino’. Because that really would be quite nasty.
Don’t you think that there are some seedlings where you are glad most didn’t survive? I once had 2 pumpkin plants which were quite enough to cope with. I currently have the opposite problem with foxglove seedlings (I have millions) and have been miserably thinning them; all those lovely babies, yanked out..
Sshh. You’ll give St*rb*cks ideas….
Emma – I’m terrible at being ruthless enough with my seedlings and always end up with everything crammed together rather than yank enough out.
Autolycus – you read it here first.
Great article. If you ask me it was the coffee grounds. I have a thing for using them, and have about 1.5 tonnes of it either in the compost bin, on the garden beds, on the lawn, all over. I welcome you to check out my site and what I have been learning about in the use of coffee grounds. Cheers.
http://shanegenziuk.wordpress.com/category/ground-to-ground/
Hot stuff. I’m certainly going to try using coffee again next year.
[...] I keep meaning to read up more on plant nutrition and become a proper gardener, the kind who can remember the difference between nitrogen, potassium and the other one and keep track of what supplies what and why and when, but every time I start to look into it properly my brain starts to hurt and gardening starts to feel like work – the sort of thing you can get wrong. And that’s no fun, so I go back to randomly googling stuff on the internet and doing the things that sound as if they make sense, or at least might make a vaguely amusing blog post. And all I can say is the nettle tea seems to work, at least for me. Although I’m very glad that, as a tomato-sceptic, I don’t actually have to eat the end result. Me, I’m sticking to the veg I feed on coffee. [...]
[...] pumpkins are beginning to grow. Slowly. Perhaps they need some coffee. Slug trap in the [...]
[...] (so far at least). Another crop which hasn’t done too well – with the exception of Seymour – has been squash. This year I decided to give my plants the best possible start in life in [...]