Pumpkins Gourds Squashes or whatever.

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This year I have grown gourd seeds from a mixed packet and I have had so much enjoyment from the six plants I have been growing, so far.

So I started 6 seeds in early May. Being from a mixed pack they were all different colours and sizes, so I tried to pick a mixture of large/small. The seed pack reads Gourds small fruited mixture. I was extremely pleased that all germinated fairly quickly.

Firstly, they grew well which I wasn’t expecting as the pack is well out of date. Secondly, this summer, in the north of England, it has been very wet and windy and I’m surprised they are still all growing strong after all the weather battering’s they have had. I live on a hill and my garden is quite exposed and usually it doesn’t take much WEATHER to ruin things for me. Also, we haven’t had too much sun this summer.

Anyway. Initially, it was like finding out that I was pregnant and waiting to find out what the little blighters would look like. And six all at once! I was getting a little bit impatient at times eagerly awaiting the female flowers to start forming and trying to work out from their shape, what I would be growing eventually.

Now that they have developed fruits, I’m obsessed to figure out what colour they will eventually be and how big they will grow.

So this is where I am today. I’ll have to update later with additional photos of the finished products.

I have had a lot of fun with these this year! Next year I plan to plant some more of these. (Even though the pack is years out of date).

Pumpkins – not that small, to say they are supposed to be small gourds. They are the size of a small football now and don’t appear to be slowing down on growth yet. They are heavy!

Smaller pumpkins of some variety. I have 4 similar sized ones on this one vine. They are pretty, not really growing any more, and haven’t made an effort to change colour really.

small tennis ball sized. Very pale almost bluish green in colour. I love this one. I have tried to hand pollenate all of the female flowers on this vine, but so far, most have rotted well before getting to this stage. I have quite a few that I have hand pollenated over the last week, so I’m hoping for a couple more as they are beautiful. The strange thing about this vine is some of the immature females are two tone, some are yellow/green and others are pale yellow. The colour varies also as to how much is green/yellow on the two tone females. some only have a bit of green, others are half and half. Anyway, none of the two tone have developed on like the one in the photo above.

Not sure what to call these? I planted these out too early (before the others) as the vine died off a bit (due to bad weather) but came back well and now I have lots of small female fruits which only seem to get this big (15 cm in length?) Not sure if they are a type green squash? I will just leave them on the vine to mature as much a possible and see what happens.

Yellow squash, we had a lot of these and they tasted good. They have stopped developing more now, again due to the wet, windy weather I assume and so the ones left on the vine now, I am leaving to mature into whatever they will.

My yellow squash when they were developing. I think we got our moneys worth out of the seed pack with just this one vines worth of production. Nice and tasty and a lovely surprise!

Well, thank you for reading and I’ll try and add photos later in Autumn with further developments.

• 14 Aug, 2015
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