Death in the Afternoon

Well once again I went to my garden only to find DEAD SQUASH PLANTS!  This happens every year.  I hear stories of people who are so overloaded with squash, they leave baskets of zucchini on their neighbor's porches in the dead of night.  Don't blame me if you find unwanted zucchini when you go out to get your morning paper.  I certainly didn't put it there!  

Every year, my squash plants  are killed by squash vine borers.  I have tried every remedy I find on the internet, in organic gardening books, or non-organic gardening books.  Nothing seems to work. It's amazing the effect seeing these dead plants has on me.  I take it so personally.  Every year I begin to believe that I've beaten them (the squash vine borers), because the plants look so good and are loaded with flowers and tiny squashlets.  It's crushing to come out one day and find them dead!

This year, I tried to salvage the yellow squash by cutting open the stem of the plant and removing the larva, which are, by the way, disgusting!  I removed ten larvae from one plant and six from the other, and then piled potting soil on top of the cut stem to 

encourage rooting.  The plant survived, but barely, and certainly hasn't produced any more squash.  The zucchini just collapsed so completely it was pointless to try to do anything.  I still had hope for the patty pan squash, which I love, and when I found it dead one afternoon, I almost started crying. 

             

So how do all these people wind up with so much zucchini that it gives rise to urban legends?  That is the great mystery.  Do squash vine borers choose 

only certain areas in which to live?  Can you get them to move somewhere else?  Am I destined to forever buy rather than grow squash?  Obviously, if there are squash available to buy, someone else has figured out how to grow them.  I talked to Earl who goes to my church and is 90 years old.  He grew up on a farm, and still lives on a farm, and has either helped in a garden or grown his own for almost all of his 90 years.  He has squash vine borers, too and has never been able to get rid of them.  90 years!  I'm taking this as a bad sign for my ability to grow squash.  Does anybody have any suggestions?

What's manure tea?

Welcome to my new blog!  I live way out in the country in an old house built in 1804 which I'm trying to restore.  I have four dogs, four horses, 24 hens, one rooster, and 9 guinea hens.  I once kept a cookbook only because it had a recipe calling for 26 eggs because I figured I could make that anytime I wanted.  I also have a large vegetable garden, and from year to year have had some successes with it and some failures. What succeeds seems to be different every year, but I consistently fail with zucchini of all things.  I hate squash vine borers!  I want to share some of the experiences I'm having out here on my farm, with all these animals, an old house and a garden and maybe get some ideas from you.  I really want to learn to grow my own food, and to learn more about the farmers around me who are doing interesting things to produce high quality food for a local market.  Their efforts are helping to preserve farmland and a way of life at the same time they are helping us to get back to a way of eating that's more responsible and more delicious!  My old house has always been part of a farm and farming was the way the people who built it made their living.  I want to restore not just the building but the way of life that it has always known, so learning about different foods people are producing on their small farms is interesting to me and I hope it will be interesting to you too.   

So what is manure tea?  Frankie, the guy who cuts my hay, was telling me that he grew these amazing tomatoes last year and that he did it with manure tea.  His tomato plants got so big he had to brace the cages to support them.  And he didn't just have great plants either.  Those plants were loaded with tomatoes.  What he did was cut out the bottom of plastic milk jugs, stuck the mouth of the jug into the ground, put some manure in it and filled it with water. Voila!  Manure tea!  I thought, gosh, I have all these horses and chickens making manure every day whether I ask them or not, so I'm trying it this year with my tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant and it's working great.  My tomato plants have really jumped and have so many tomatoes.  Score one for the home team!  I was telling my daughter about it (she lives in the big city!) and we had a funny conversation about the state of my life.  Manure tea- why don't I think it's gross?  She clearly struggled to grasp my excitement.  But as she tells her friends, my mom used to shop at Bergdorf's, but now she shops at Tractor Supply!  Things change.