Update: Desert King Watermelon and Squash 7/8/13

Desert King Watermelon

Last year, the only item we sold in any quantity at our single outing to the Capitol City Farmers Market was Desert King watermelon.  This is a yellow fleshed watermelon with exceptional sweetness.  From what we heard through the watermelon vine, people enjoyed our watermelons as much as we did.  Because everyone loved them so much, we planted a lot more this year.  Maybe not as many as we could possibly sell, but as many as we felt like planting, weeding, watering, and picking.

Things got off to a rocky start for the watermelon this spring when we had spotty germination and many of our plants didn't come up.  The soil may have been a little too cool, so we filled in the gaps in the rows a couple weeks later.  The second planting came up very well and we should have a nice crop of watermelons in a month or so.

Buttercup and Butternut Squash

We weren't really sure if we were going to sell squash at the market this year.  We eat a lot of it and we plan to save some for baby food.  However, we found that the chickens don't care for it much as a winter crop, and by the looks of the squash plants we're not going to have any shortage of the stuff.  So we're hoping that if all goes well we will have some squash at the market.


Squash blossom

Buttercup squash are my personal favorite.  When you cut them open it smells like a lot like a cantaloupe.  We've struggled, unfortunately, with squash borers in previous years that killed over half of our buttercup plants.  Butternut, on the other hand, is resistant to squash borers and showed no signs of insect damage.  Our neighbors have said that they have had similar troubles, as well.  We obviously have some learning to do on how to control squash borers if we are hoping to produce many buttercups.  They are so good they are worth it, though, so hopefully we'll be writing a post in the future about how to successfully control squash borers without dumping a chemical facility on your food.