- Today let's talk about
squash, melons and cucumbers, which all belong to the
same family, Cucurbits. I'm gonna go over how to sew, grow, train, prune, maintain, stave
off diseases, and more, for this wonderful family of plants that everyone loves to
grow all summer long. Step one to success is, how do you actually start your plants? Well, you basically have two options. One is direct sewing,
which we'll talk about next or you start 'em in a seed tray and transplant them out into the garden. Now quick caveat about
starting 'em in seed trays. You can actually start them off in something as small as the six cells. But the idea is that once they
actually sprout and emerge you wanna transplant them pretty quickly. You can wait for their
true leaves to emerge, but after that point
you really don't wanna wait around any longer. You wanna either pot 'em
up or put 'em in the ground 'cause there's just not enough
soil in those containers for something as vigorous as these plants. Now my preferred method is to actually start them in four cells because
they have plenty of soil, which makes it easy to water. It also gives them plenty of nutrients to get their growth growing quick because these guys grow fast, especially in the middle of summer. Now, I will say that later we will be transplanting
these two Charentais melons and this Janoski watermelon. And as you can see here, this is just a three inch four cell and they've carried for quite a while in such a small container. Now I wouldn't recommend
waiting this long, these were kind of forgotten seedlings, but they'll do just
fine once transplanted. So now, let's transition
over to an in-ground section where I'll show you what
happens when you direct sew your squash, melons or cucumbers. So here's a direct sow
example, this is Dirani squash, I put two in the ground
at the exact same time that I put two in each one of
these cells on the four cell. These came up two days before these and they already have
their first true leaves. Why is that? Well, this is a gigantic block of soil. It's the earth. So there's a lot more potential, there's a lot more heat, there's a lot more stability in the soil that allows that squash
to kind of pop up sooner. The advantage of doing
it in ground is that it grows a little bit faster, not by much, but what I'm noticing here
is that one of the leaves got entirely chewed off
and that's why I put two, because when you grow in-ground
there's always a chance that a pest can entirely take it out before it actually has a chance to grow. If a cutworm came in this particular spot and chomped the squash,
I would have zero squash. By growing them in transplant cells I can make sure that they have like two, three, four true leaves before transplanting them in the garden, which means that they'll be more robust than any pest can handle and they'll survive pretty much anything. Now the other thing I really
like about transplanting is that I was able to put these here because I knew that that spot was open and I knew I wanted to grow squash there. All those others in those four
cells that you saw earlier I don't really know where
I'm gonna put 'em all. So if I had to actually
decide where to put 'em all I probably would miss the season. By putting 'em in four cells, I have the chance to kind of
open up new space in my garden and pop these in when
I find the right space for that particular plant. The next thing you need to know about growing these plants is how much sunlight and what
is a good location for them? And that's why we're over here because I actually made a huge
mistake earlier in the season and it's right next to me. I'm crouching down here in what is supposed to be
my three sisters garden, which quickly turned into
a two sisters garden. I have corn and beans growing right here and right here is squash that was supposed to be
trailing all throughout here but I made a crucial mistake and that is how much sunlight these plants are getting where they are. This corn grew so fast
that it's actually blocking all almost all the sun
after about one o'clock from reaching the ground right here and off to the left here I
have this Pride of Madeira, which actually blocks a lot
of the early morning sun and that means that these squash plants are only getting probably two
to four hours of sunlight max. This has been in here since April and it's basically doing
absolutely nothing. So, they're actually serving no purpose, there's really no reason for
me to continue growing them and that's just an important thing to remember about these guys. They make really large fruit, or they make an abundance
of fruit like in cucumbers, so they need a lot of
sunlight in order to do so. Make sure that when you plant these that they're getting plenty of sun, probably at the very minimum six but really eight hours of sunlight in order to produce an
actual sizeable harvest that's worth growing. Now we have a basic understanding of how to start these seeds and also what kind of light they need. So let's get some in the
ground and get it growing. And I wanna plant a couple
on this trellis right here that I built last year. It's going to be planted with those Charentais
melons I showed earlier, but also show you two to
three other quick options after we plant this out. But I gotta get some of these
plants out of the way first. This is slightly off topic, but I figured it's a cool enough thing that you guys would wanna see it. These are actually Breadseed poppies and the flowers have long gone and what's left are
their poppy seed heads. So this is actually
how you get poppy seeds like if you wanted to grow them to make your own poppy seed muffins, poppy seed bagels, things like that. So here are the poppy seed heads and if you look at the top
there are all these openings and that is where the seeds come out, so all that is poppy seed. Now I could either save
this to plant as new seed or I could save these to
use as culinary poppy seeds, which is probably what I'm going to do just 'cause it's going to
be a fun little side thing. So here's what I've
collected from that plant. Now the bed has been cleared and we can go ahead and
throw these melons in. So the idea behind this
sort of trellis structure is that melons take up a lot of space. They sprawl all over the place and they shoot off a lot of side vines or suckers that also
take up even more space. So one of the good ways of growing them and actually getting a lot
more space back in your garden is to grow them vertically. They're not heavy enough that
they would break the plant. So that's why I'm choosing to put this particular melon
on a trellis like this. And just to get things
started I'm gonna weave the vine through at least a
couple of these fence brackets just so it has a good starting point and it knows that that's
where it's going to be living. I forgot to mention that
you want to make sure you use mulch on these guys because they will suffer
from improper pollination and just weirdly shaped fruits if they don't get
consistent watering early on in the period where they're actually forming and creating fruit. Later in the season a lot of these things actually want the water
to be cut back severely so they get sweeter or more
rich and they store better. For example, for winter squash or for watermelon they taste much sweeter if you stop watering in
the last couple weeks. But at the beginning, a hundred percent you wanna make sure you're giving 'em adequate water and mulch is a great way to
make sure you're doing that. So, one other way of growing these is to just put 'em in the ground somewhere where they have plenty of space to ramble. So this large bed here has
kind of been designated as squash and watermelon heaven, because I've just left it totally open. There's nothing else to really block it except for a couple of poppies that haven't seemed to get the message that it's fully summer now. So over here I have my Kabocha squash and it's actually already
been setting some fruit. I see one fruit over here that's already sizing up quite nicely. I have some watermelon over
here, another melon over here. And I plan on putting a
couple more starts over here once they emerge from those four cells. Now keep in mind that if you
do plant them in the ground they're going to take up a lot of space. They wanna send out a lot
of vines, they wanna ramble, 'cause they need all that sunlight to produce these large fruit. So this is option number two, just shove them in the ground but make sure you have enough space. Option number three, as you can see I'm behind
in this prison over here and all of this is
paracord that's running up along these conduits. So the squash right here,
which is the Centercut which actually, I see at least six or actually maybe 10 squash
forming on it right now, are entirely supported by this string. You don't need a welded wire
fence or anything like that. All you need is some strong string and somewhere to tie it off to, and the squash or the
cucumber or the melons will do the rest. They have these tendrils
which will wrap around, grab onto things and that
allows them to stay upright without any additional support as long as you give them
something to climb on. And yet another option is
to do something like this where you have a trellis net
attached to some tree stakes, a two by two or anything
you really have handy. And this trellis net will, again, give them something to climb on, and that's how I've been
growing my cucumbers this year. And as you can see right here, I just have a six or eight
foot bed with a bunch of plants that are only
taking up vertical space, otherwise all of this would
have to be on the ground and you could quickly see how much space these plants could take up. But I just got a wonderful cucumber and this trellis has been
treating me well all season long. Here are a couple basic pruning tips for growing squash, melons and cucumbers, starting with the melons and squash. The only thing I'll say for that is that you wanna make sure you
limit each one of those vines to produce maybe three fruit max. If you want to guarantee you'll have two very large delicious
ones, stick to two per vine. It's just a safer way to make sure that instead of getting four
or five mediocre fruit, you're gonna get two or
three truly delicious things that you want to eat. Now when it comes to
cucumbers, they're different, because you harvest them continuously, maybe every day throughout the season. So, when it comes to growing these, the method that I've been
sticking to this year is to try to be training my cucumbers to only have one vine
that is at the start. So as you can see here, this guy only really has one
growth going all the way up. It has no offshoots or
suckers or bushiness. And the idea behind this is that you're concentrating your plant to reach the top of your trellis. Once it reaches the top of its trellis it's still producing fruit along the way but it now has a lot of leaf matter and it has plenty of sunlight. And once it's at the top, no more pruning, let everything go wild, and it's just gonna be raining cucumbers all the way down until that
vine hits the ground again. And you'll get so many cucumbers you won't know what to do with them. But now, let's transition
to problems you might face when it comes to fruit
formation and pollination. Starting off with
something I see right here, which has to do with improper watering. This could happen to anyone no matter how experienced they are, and that is when you reach
down to harvest a cucumber and you find that one part
of it is extra swollen compared to the rest. This is actually entirely to
do with inconsistent watering. Sometimes it's out of your control. So take a look at this right here. This is where the cucumber
started to form it's normal size, over here it pinches down
and it gets really skinny, and then it gets really swollen. So what happened was that the
heat came in into the season just in this past week, turned on the irrigation extra heavy and all that extra water swelled up the bottom of the cucumber. While this part never got plenty of water during its formation. So this is an inconsistent water problem. The way to solve it is to set a consistent irrigation
schedule or mulch very deeply so that you don't get any
sort of discrepancy from water when it starts to form to
when it finishes forming. Now let's talk about pollination and how to step in and
do it yourself manually. This is a tiny paintbrush and what you're looking at over here are all my Centercut squash. Now if you weren't familiar, there's basically two
different types of flowers in the plant world, to keep it simple. There's plants that have
male and female flowers and then there's plants
that have both together. Tomatoes are an example of one that have both into the same flower, so they could actually
self pollinate themselves. Now squash has the male and female flower, so do cucumbers,
watermelons, anything else. The cool thing about this method is that you don't actually need to use the male flower from the same squash, you could use it from a
different volunteer squash. You just can't collect the seed and get the same fruit in the end. The difference between the male and female is that the male is just a flower and then at the bottom is a stem. There's no actual fruit or ovary, which is true on the female flower. So here's an example of a female squash. It has the fruit, it looks
just like the final fruit that you're going to harvest and then it has the flower at the end. It's very distinctly different
from the male flower, which as you could see
here is just the stem with a flower on the end. So now let's actually go ahead
and do the business for them. You have two different ways of doing this. Now obviously, I ripped
this off the plant, so this isn't going to form any fruit. So this is the male
flower, this is the female. One option is that you could take this and rub it against every single
part of the female flower and now you effectively
transport pollen yourself. Now in my garden, I have so
many bees and things like that that I don't really need to
do any manual pollination 'cause there's plenty
of pollinators around. Now if you don't wanna rip off the flower or you don't wanna walk around and do that to every single one you can just get your paintbrush brush, brush along the bottom,
there's usually a lot of pollen or along the actual stigma itself. And then just use your brush to transfer the pollen that way. The other cool thing is
that if you have a bunch of male and female flowers
not forming at the same time, which can be extremely frustrating, you could take a male flower
thrown in a Ziploc bag, keep it in the fridge for a day or two, and that pollen should still be viable. The most common and frustrating disease that can affect these plants
is probably powdery mildew. It is a fungal kind of mildew spore that creates these little
white dots all over your plant, and suffocate those leaves from actually being
able to photosynthesize. Now, a couple key ways to avoid it are, number one, don't water your
plant late in the evening where the leaves will be sitting wet all throughout the night and
not have a chance to dry off, 'cause that will create
a perfect environment for mildew to thrive and continue to multiply all over your plant. Number two is highly consider
growing your plants vertically 'cause by growing them vertically there's very little soil
contact, first of all, but there's also a heck
of a lot of airflow coming through the entire plant. If this was on the ground maybe only the leaves
would get a little bit of wind coming through them. But when you grow it vertically the entire plant can get blown by wind, dries off and kind of keeps those fungal spores more in check. But there is one other major pest that can deeply affect all these plants, that is the Squash vine borer. The Squash vine borer or SVB is a very common pest for many
gardeners across the nation. Luckily, I don't have
that pest in my garden, at least not yet, maybe soon. But here's what happens. It's a moth that comes over to the base of your squash
plant, lays its eggs. As those eggs hatch,
little larvae come out and they start boring their
way into your squash stem. This kills the squash stem
because it eats it out entirely. And now there's no way
for water and nutrients to flow up the plant. So there are a couple options. Once the damage has been done, you could literally perform surgery and pull that larva out and kill it. There's a lot of videos online that you could find on
how to do that procedure. But the other thing you could do is once you have actually removed that larva, or solved that problem some other way, what you could do is actually
create a new root system. These plants are so robust and resilient and every single part of their stem can essentially form new roots
especially at the leaf nodes. So all you have to do, let's say that the Squash vine
borer damage was over here. You did surgery, you killed it, but you're still not getting enough roots to actually support your squash. Just come up further on the plant, find a stem with a leaf node, and then just bury it with soil. Over time this will now
create a new root system that'll now supersede the old one and provide nutrients to
the rest of your plant. All those people who grow
the giant watermelons, the giant pumpkins, they use this method across the board for every single part of their stem 'cause they want every
single part of the stem to root into the ground so that they have a gigantic root network
instead of just the main one where you planted it. This allows more water and
nutrients to get to your plant to produce that bigger squash, and actually you could
just use this in general if you want your plant to be healthier and create more, bigger squash, melons and I guess, cucumbers. So, that is a tip on how
to solve that problem. Another way is a preventative method, which is where you wrap the stem in foil. This, I guess, stops the
larvae from being able to penetrate into the stem, and just protects it from the
damage in the first place. So those are some common solutions and common problems when it comes to growing these three plants. Now if you wanna see how I
built the tunnel over there, where I planted the Charentais
squash earlier in the video, I have a full video which
I'll link right over here. And hopefully you guys picked
up a couple useful tricks for growing these three amazing plants, 'cause they're so delicious
and wonderful in the garden. And if you live in a warmer zone like me, it's not too late to still
put some in the ground.
