squash update and new trellis

Although I said I was giving up on the squash, you knew I wouldn't be able to totally do it. I'm not inspecting the leaves the way I was, but I did decide that if the plants were trellised, it would be easier to find and remove bug eggs. My spouse and I together designed this tent-style trellis that will be easy to store and easy to put up next year. The squash plant seems to love it - though I did have to uproot some of the areas where it attached, it has grown quite a bit since we put the trellis up.

This is the trellis, modeled by two watermelon plants.

I'm considering trying to grow squash again - just once more. If I do, I will be extremely proactive about insects and I won't add any new vegetables, so I can focus my attention and energy on successfully growing squash. I know now the importance of checking your garden every day - I would train the squash (so it didn't grow through the neighbor's fence), inspect it, put out insect traps, etc.

However, the squash plant that had the large fruit set on it is officially dead. It was looking pretty bad near the root, but one of the vines still looked strong, so I put extra dirt around its root and gave it some water in hopes that it would become the new root. Each day it looked worse and today, the large fruit had fallen off. It's been 10 days since we performed squash surgery, so I don't know if the plant died because of the surgery or because we didn't find all of the borers. The other plant that we found about a dozen small borers in looks really good - for now - though it doesn't have any fruit set.

The zucchini is still growing strong and we've harvested several. A summer squash that I planted later is growing slowly - maybe it is working on its roots or maybe it doesn't like the heat wave we've had.

(7/28)