Garden variety sex education

A while back I wrote about my rather brownish green thumb.  The couple of dozen tomatoes I managed to grow are just turning red.  My beans were attacked by some little bastard rodent.  My broccoli heads are puny, thanks in part to my friend the flea beetle. It just wasn't a stellar season in the garden of the farmette.

The one thing that seemed to grown beautifully were the many different variety of squash.  I boasted about them on Facebook after feeling more than a little inadequate upon seeing pictures of Prince's godfathers' garden. Check it out on Pinterest:
http://pinterest.com/douglasatkin/the-hidden-garden/

"Garlic the size of my fist!" was the caption under the image of the bushel of large beautiful garlic heads.  Well, mine were the size of the quarter used in the comparison.

Their garden is also beautiful.  A gorgeous stone wall surrounds the raised beds that seem to produce five times the amount of produce as my 750 square foot behemoth. A little metal bistro table with two chairs are set up in the middle so they can enjoy a cold drink while they snap their 50lbs of beans.  The only problem they have is the chipmunk that likes to steal some of the tasty veggies.

What?!  A chipmunk?  As in one? We have a hideous 12 foot fence surrounding our garden with electric wire strewn throughout.  It makes a supermax look low tech in comparison, and still we have all sorts or break ins.  Detecting a bit of jealously?

In my attempt to turn lemons into lemonade, I decided to concentrate my attention on the success of the squash.

The plants started growing like crazy.  I had to train one vine through the ugly fence because there was no more room in its bed. There were all sorts of blossoms with promise of lots of delicious squash that we would be eating throughout the winter.  I got a little impatient though because none of the flowers seemed to be producing any fruit.

I had read in a magazine that you can pollinate your own plants just by taking a QTip and rubbing some pollen from one flower into another flower.  How unbelievably cool is that? I felt like Mother Nature impregnating all of my little squash plants.

I am a little embarrassed to admit that I didn't realize I was trying to impregnate the boy flowers until I came upon a girl flower.  I am sure many of you are thinking, "Didn't she take biology?" But the fact is I cannot remember high school biology.  I can't even remember who my biology teacher was.  I remember my chemistry teacher because he was a basket case who looked like he was about to go Postal at any given moment, which kept me on my toes. And my physics teacher was this wacky woman who looked like Olive Oil from Popeye but was a really great teacher.   No memory of the biology teacher though.  Any of my high school friends who read this, a little help here.

For anyone else out there who is as clueless as I was, there is indeed a girl flower that will bear the fruit and a boy flower that will supply the pollen.  I was so excited by this discovery that I dragged the boys up to the garden to teach them this important prequel to sex ed.

I first show them the stamen of the boy squash blossom and ask if they think it is the boy blossom or the girl blossom.  They all look around like they might die of boredom and shrug their shoulders.

I then open the girl blossom and asked again.  "Which one do you think is the boy blossom and which one is the girl?"

James Dean's eyes bug out of his head as he yells, "Are those tic tacs?" He stares at the little orange stigma inside the blossom in the hopes that they might be his favorite candy.  For one glorious moment he must have really thought you could grow candy in the garden.

They still all shrug their heads and I nudge them along a bit.  "Doesn't this look like a penis?" I ask as I point to the stamen.  All three snicker, "Yeah."

I go on to wax poetic about the wonders of nature and how the bees pollinate the flowers so the squash will grow.  I then show them how they can do it too.  They don't seem to share my enthusiasm.

"Can we go back down now?"  Scrappy Doo asks.

"Fine," I sulk.  Sex ed lesson over.

With the boys gone I go about my job of helping the bees pollinate.

It didn't dawn on me until a couple of weeks later that some of the squash seemed a little strange.  I didn't think much of it since in keeping with my tradition of painstakingly listing all of my seedlings in a notebook, only to neglect to label the pots I transplanted them into;  I meticulously mapped out my garden, only to throw some random squash seeds in, when it appeared that the butternut and acorn squash were not going to grow.  I told myself I would just thin the mounds out if everything started to grow.

Well boys and girls, there is this little phenomenon called cross pollination.  I assumed the weird white acorn squash was a result of the blue hubbard seeds I randomly planted and the tall green pumpkin that was supposed to be a pie pumpkin, must be green because it just needs to ripen.

It didn't dawn on me that I was channeling my inner Dr. Moreau and not my inner Mother Nature, until I attempted to chop up a soft skinned patty pan squash. I couldn't get my knife into it.  When I finally cut it open, the normally white flesh was actually a pale orange.

In my zealous attempt to pollinate the squash, I must have been knocking up all of the female squash blossoms up with the prolific acorn squash sperm.  I now have acorn/pumpkin, acorn/pattypan, acorn/zucchini and acorn/hubbard.

Luckily it all still tastes good even if it is a little hard to cut the zucchini. I decide to save the seeds and see what happens next year.  Maybe I discovered a new super squash that is pest resistant and will end global hunger?  I guess I had better come up with a name for it.