June 16, 2016

Good morning, it has been a bit confusing but for some reason my eggplants keep having leaf edge burn. The truly perplexing thing about this is that I do not notice any of the precursor signs of leaf burn. There has not been any leaf wilt. The leaves have always been (I love this word) very turgid. I plan to augment water to the eggs in between water days. With my drip system every bed gets four hours of water every 3 days.

There are no other beds or portion of beds that are exhibiting water deprivation signs.  I am getting several tomatoes that are in excess of 12 ounces. Only one tom has had blossom end rot. Since our soils are high in calcium the only other reason for blossom end rot is irregular watering. But only one tom would not give me pause especially with the sizes of the other tomatoes. The same reasoning holds with the chilies, I am getting big Jims that are 12 inches+. This is not a diminished water sign.

There always is the possibility that they are infected with root knot nematodes, but other than leaf burn, there are not any of the other signs that I would expect to see; such as leaf yellowing and smaller plant sizes. Yes very confusing.

There are number of set fruit and we will have to see if they mature to the 1 to 2 pound size. Last year a one pound fruit was a big one. I do not feel it has anything to do with the fact that the eggplants are from saved seed, but I will not rule that out. None the less the leaf burn confuses me. Hopefully further examination will expose the reason. These are the only plants in the garden that are performing adversely from my expectations. It could be easy to ignore this as an anomaly, but it seems to be happening with all the eggs.

This spring I was given the seed from a new winter squash. It is a Japanese heirloom. The mature fruits are supposed to be < 3 pounds, which are a perfect market squash. The variety is Kuri and the skins ripen to a bright red color. An interesting thing had to do with the seed company that they were from, Bakers Creek Heirloom. This is a company that only sells heirloom seeds. Their main intent is to save varieties before the seed lines disappear, so this implies that they would like gardeners to save the seeds from these crops.

The very interesting thing that I find is that nowhere on the seed packet do they give the scientific name for this squash. This can be a problem with saving squash seeds. Squash are a huge family of many different varieties. These varieties are broken into several different families of which there is no cross pollination between these families, but within the families it happens very easily.

Of these families there are three that most varieties come from. They are: Maxima, Moschata, and Pepo.

Pepo is the home for a lot of our familiar squash varieties. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Pepo is the bristled foliage. Some of the more common squash in this family are zucchini, yellow crook neck, pumpkins, and acorn squash.

Moschata includes butternut and trombone squash. Two varieties that I have grown but it was very difficult to save seed from these squash because the very easily cross. I liked the trombone squash but it was not very productive (especially considering the amount of space it occupied), so I discontinued it. This made saving butternut seeds much, much easier. A very common characteristic of these vines besides being quite sprawling is the fuzzy roundness of the leaves. Knowing that these were also characteristics of the Kuri, I was afraid that it would be in the Moschata family.

So since there was no scientific name on the seed packet, I needed to do some searching. I have a seed saving book that does break down the families and then list most of the more common varieties within those families. It really was a relief to find that the Kuri squash was within the Maxima family. This will make saving seeds very easy!! Now it is only with my Pepo squash that I will need to take precautions with cross pollination.

So, I am curious to see how the Kuri performs with harvest quantities, storability, and sell ability.  If this squash turns out to fill all of these requirements, I will most likely grow one bed of butternut and one of Kuri. Last year with the butternuts I had several hundred pounds to store. Until I got the last squash stashed I did not think I would have enough room. If the Kuri turns out to be as prolific, this year could be a storage night mare, but with one bed of each next year this will be doable.

Usually I cringe when given seeds to try, especially after I do my yearly garden plan in October. Fortunately I had some crops prematurely ripen and bolt. This opened a space large enough to do a decent trial for this squash, so, in the near future look for some red colored squash on the table at market or maybe even in bags.

This week I anticipate harvesting chard, kale, carrots, summer squash, green beans, chili’s, cucumbers, okra, and tomatoes.