How to Grow Squash from Seed to MASSIVE Harvest

today's video is sponsored by black gold compost company i want to thank the good people over at black gold for the generous domain donation of all this beautiful black cow cow manure that we use in our video today and it's made a tremendous success in our garden i've been using black cow for many years ever since 1980 and it's always made a tremendous difference in my garden and i've been very pleased with our product i highly recommend it thank you black gold for sponsoring our channel well happy new day homestead family today we're going to do a video on growing squash we're going to grow it together we'll be right back [Music] well welcome back friends you know if this is your first time growing squash and and our channel is is really uh dialed down on trying to help the you know the beginner gardener first time gardener and uh as well as you know the seasoned master gardeners as well but our real goal is to help folks get started and uh i like to do it in a way that keeps it nice and simple and um so they don't scare you to death you know because really it's nothing to it and anyone can do it and i want you to enjoy the joy and the peace that you're going to find in your own garden in your backyard not to mention the health benefits and the fantastic tasting vegetables so today if you've never grown squash before i'm going to go through the basics and we're going to grow just a typical summer squash and we're gonna grow it together and uh i started these from seed and they've been out here on the uh hardening table for a couple days now two or three days and you know they've already got a good true leaf on them these cotton leaves um you know they've been living off the cottle and leaves you know when they emerge but once once i see the true leaves come up they are ready to go to the ground they're ready to start gobbling up some of that good old photosynthesis so today let's get these in the ground we're going to plant them over in the earth bed directly into the ground transplant them into the ground and i wanted to go through some basics with you so that you would know what to look for before you get started in your squash garden this year so let's take a look at a little diagram i drew up i thought that might um make it easier it always helped me when i was you know younger if i could see something in a picture so pictures help me i hope to help you so let's check it out all right let's take a look at some pictures together um the first thing i want to talk about is you know when to sow your seeds you want to start your squash seeds after all danger of frost has passed you these are warm temperature plants they grow in the summer really good and they really do not like cold temperatures if you was to get them out there and get them going and you get a you know a surprise frost on them you're going to probably lose your squash so don't risk it wait until that frost is completely gone and you can you can direct sow or you can start squash from seed i got my seeds here i got them from johnnyseed.com and that's a good place to get seeds and today we're going to be transplanting i prefer to transplant my seed seeds for squash instead of trying to direct sow i seem to have a whole lot better success when i start them in the seed trays and transplant them and i can get the fertilizer down there the way i want to do it and it just seems to work better for me now speaking of fertilizer i don't know if any of y'all have seen a lot of my videos but you'll see that i use fish for a fertilizer and i've used it for decades and decades and decades with much success i really like using the organic fish it decomposes really quick and gives a really good organic boost of fertilizer that usually lasts the entire cycle of my plant i'd rarely do i have to come back and side dress anything that i'm using my fish in now if you can't get a hold of fish if you don't fish go fishing like we do me and nancy have tons of fish heads out there in a freezer that we save all winter you know saving them up for spring but you could also go to a fresh fish market if you have one in your area and they'll give you the heads and guts if you just ask them for them and man that's free fertilizer so take advantage of that and um if you don't have one of them if you have like a bait store near you somewhere especially a saltwater bait store you know folks that live on the ocean coast they always have frozen bait fish that you can buy real cheap and it's a it's a terrific fertilizer now if you don't have either one that's okay too what i do is i'll put in four tablespoons of bone meal because i want to really push the phosphorus to get that root growth and the blooms on these plants and two tablespoons of blood meal that'll help with the leaf growing the leaves and i'll always add some garden lime which ain't nothing but pulverized dolomitic limestone and that's to reduce that blossom end rot now if you've never grown squash before one of the one of the common problems that a lot of folks experience growing squashes you get that blossom end rot on them same thing with tomatoes it looks the same the end of the fruit will start to die back and just all of a sudden rot from the end of the fruit back and it's very disappointing and it's much easier to prevent blossom end rot rather than trying to um you know cure it after it gets started and here's some of the uh two things i can tell you to do and i'm going to do it today uh one reason that these uh blossom end rot gets going is first of all you got way too much fertilizer which causes the leaves to grow a lot faster than the roots and if the plant's roots can't take up that calcium fast enough and the end of the root the end of the fruit will suffer and it'll rot so you know you don't want to boost the nitrogen on these plants what you really want to boost is the phosphorus which will boost the the roots the root system and it gets the plenty of blooms as as the plant matures as well so the um the nitrogen is something that you want to be real careful with that's why up here i'll put four tablespoons of blood meal to two i mean i'm sorry four tablespoons of bone meal to two tablespoons of blood meal i got twice as much phosphorus as i do nitrogen and that's the reason because i don't want too much nitrogen on there the second thing that causes this blossom end rot is basically it's a calcium deficiency especially in my soil i have sandy soil down here in florida and it's terrible and it's i know it's calcium deficient so by adding the lime into the hole when i'm planting it that will greatly reduce that blossom end rot and in my case what i've always found is when i add four or five tablespoons of of the of the calcium you know the the dopamine limestone garden lime when i add that into the hole i don't even get blossom end rot so it helps and i i highly recommend adding in the garden lime okay and you can get that garden lime at lowe's i go up there and get a big old 40 pound bag and that lasts me a whole year sometimes two years so you know it's not expensive you know less than right around about 10 bucks last time i bought some but anyway you won't have that lime on hand now i another reason that i put the lime in the hole is when i'm using fish i put that lime right on top of that fish because i want to mask the smell of that fish decomposing because if the animal smells that he's going to come over and dig it up trying to get to that fish and he's going to end up digging up your plant so always put the lime in there if you have um fish for a fertilizer and if you don't still put the lime in there because you need it for the calcium deficiency okay so our pla our squash is going to prefer well-drained soil with a ph of about 5.8 to 6.8 that's that's standard for a vegetable you know i try to hit 6.0 6.5 for all my vegetables and that seems to be the sweet spot and you can expect these things to harvest the first harvest in about 60 days and you will get multiple harvests i get at least two or three harvests off of every plant if i can get my plants to live that long okay now here's a little picture i wanted to show you i hope you could see this okay this is how i plant my squash out into earth bed when i get me an area that i'm going to plant my squash in i want to give them five to six feet in between rows and the reason for that is is these squash plants these summer squash they're not trellis type plants they're not going to grow on a trellis these are bush plants they're going to spread out on the ground and they get real big they get my my plants will get six seven feet in diameter so that's why i put five to six feet in between my row spacing each row and now the spacing on the row is i go five to six feet center to center and i also stagger my plants road to row so if i'll start off three feet on this row then i'll start this row off six feet so it comes in like this see it's a staggered pattern all the way through the garden that way these plants aren't sitting right next to each other and running into each other it'll this becomes just a solid mass of plant material so staggering your plant material on on those stagger centers like that helps it to grow healthy and not getting all jumbled up with each other so this is how we're going to plant it today i've only got about three rows to do so let's head over to the earth bed earth garden and let's take a look at what we're going to do over there and how to get that done i'll meet you over there okay we're over here at the uh at the earth bed this is the area that i'm gonna dedicate to summer squash this year if you look at the bed you can see where i have already amended this soil with about four to six inches of black cow cow manure i put it on there it's been about two and a half weeks now and now i'm going to cultivate that and incorporate that cow that animal compost i'm going to incorporate that into my soil remember when we moved here this soil was really bad and i've been working on it this is my third year and i'm still working on this soil so it's not really quite right yet but it's getting there thanks to the black cow so i'm gonna get this all cultivated in then i'm going to string up my line my guideline and i'm going to mark out my holes my spacing and then i'm going to put the fish in the hole and the the ingredients the amendment bone meal and blood meal and lime and we covered up and we put the plant in stall it on the sit five to six foot centers so let's get started on getting this show on the road okay i got this first section cultivated and uh then i graded it out with my grading rake to kind of smooth it out because i wanted to to get any little low spots out of here that i could because that just stands in water and usually causes a rot problem to any vegetables that i have in my garden so anyway i do one row at a time and i'm right here here's my guide string so i'm going to start my first row off six feet i'm six feet from the edge right i dig my hole for my fish move down another six feet dig the next one and i try to get my holes right out about six inches deep okay let me get the rest of these holes in we'll take it to the next step well here's a bag full of my favorite fishing crappie fishing and we saved the heads when when me and nancy go fishing we cleaned the fish we saved the heads and we saved the guts for a day like this so what i do in this hole i put at least one fish head in there if you have a little bitty one you can put two in each hole okay cover that fish completely okay the next step is i'm gonna put [Applause] two tablespoons of the blood meal then i'm gonna put four tablespoons of the bone meal remember we talked about that earlier three four okay then i take the dirt that i dug out of the hole and i cover the hole back up see there she is all the good stuff's right down in the bottom where those roots are going to dig down to them once i have my spot located from my spring my string i push down in a hole from the tip of my middle finger to the middle of my palm i put one more tablespoon of bone a blood meal and two more tablespoons of bone meal then i pull out a seedling and this is the seedling these are the two cotlin leaves these are the leaves that this plant survived the seedling survived off of these coddling lake cottolin leaves until it started to produce the true leaf and once it got the true leave these codling leaves will eventually turn yellow and die and fall off because now they're living off of photosynthesis and what the root system can give them so we put that in right on down in there pack it in enough where you mash the air out of it okay and when we water this in it it'll set down some more so that's how you get them into the ground let me get the rest of these plants installed and then we'll take a look at the um at the squash plot and take a look at where we're at okay we got my three rows of uh squash installed one here one two and three three rows and right when you first put it in and it's spaced out the way it is you look like wow what a waste of space and i'm sure some of my critics will have a whole lot to say about that spacing but that's okay say what you got to say i'm going to keep doing things the way i do it and the way i do it is i give my plants plenty of room to cascade out and develop into full maturity i leave plenty of room between my plants for ventilation these squash are prone to white powdery mildew so the more air i can get to move through there the better now on the watering i'm watering right now to get them soaked in when you water your squash only water in the very early morning that's it don't ever water them in the afternoon water in the early morning so they had the whole day to dry out and all that water to evaporate and just soak in real good because if they stay wet for any period of time overnight they're going to develop that white powdery mildew and we'll go into some of the um care of that as these plants mature so don't click off the video we're going to keep going on this video all the way till we harvest it so we'll be back in a couple of weeks and we'll check on the progress of this stand of squash well good morning friends it's been four weeks since we planted these squash from seed they've been out here in the earth bed and they're doing really pretty good um i'm already starting to get some male and female blooms remember you get the male and the female on the same plant which is um pretty cool and remember when you first start seeing your blossoms appear on your squash plant it's not unusual to get a whole bunch of male flowers at first don't don't be alarmed there's really nothing you need to do about that just be other than just be patient it takes them a while to get into their rhythm and get to producing the females along with it because the female bloom is the one that's going to produce the fruit you can always tell it's female because it's got a little baby fruit right behind the flower and the male just has a long stem with the flower okay so take a little close-up look it's one of these plants here you can see the plant looks very healthy and it's very vigorous there's nothing i need to do other than watch out for any diseases that may pop up and we'll be watching the progress of these in the days ahead because it really is not going to be very much longer and we're going to get our first harvest and remember we get our we get multiple harvests out of these squash plants so we're looking forward to the days ahead when they start to really produce so we'll see you back here in a few more weeks [Music] so [Music] well our squash plants have been growing for 37 days we planted them from seed 37 days ago and planted them out here in the uh earth garden and they're really starting to do something we've actually had a couple of road cold fronts and 11 days of solid rain but they've managed to come through it with no real problems and they're really producing a lot of fruit right now as you can see the every plant's just loaded and they're doing well they're cascading out if you'll remember we put these in five to six feet apart and it seemed like excessive spacing for the plants but if you look at them you can see that these things have cascaded out and they're still not touching each other there's still about a foot in between each one which is what i'm looking for because i don't want my leaves to lay on top of each other like that which creates all kinds of mildew problems so i want that ventilation and that airflow to get through these plants as much as possible so that six foot frames that six foot spacing on the row really does that and i've got them three feet apart on the row so east road is three feet apart and they're six feet apart on the row and it's working so we're looking forward to getting a good harvest on here it looks like they'll be ready to harvest in the next probably in the next five four or five days so we'll be coming out here and getting a bucket full of squash draw up some onions and get us some good old sauteed squash and onions so we'll be back in a few more days and we'll get us a little bit of something to eat we'll see you then well good morning friends it's been 43 days since we started our squash from seed and today we're doing our first harvest and the first harvest is usually really just getting started and you'll get plenty of these squash actually i get more of these squash on the second harvest but as you can see that ain't really that bad of a squash that's that one to me is a little bit too big i like them to be about a little bit smaller than that be more tender but they're still pretty good we're just picking some today so that we can um go in the house tonight and um saute some squash with some onions we just harvested a whole row of onions yesterday so we got some brand new nice and wet sweet onions to harvest with them but this would give us plenty for us and her mother and our um you know our friends and neighbors and probably in about a week these things are so heavily laden with the new fruit a week from now we'll be able to get i would say about three bushels at least three bushels of squash off of these three rows in a week from now and uh at that point we'll be able to go down two our local soup kitchen nancy's friends with all the guys down there she volunteers down there sometimes to help out and then we'll um we'll donate all that squash to the soup kitchen to help you know feed some folks that just need a hand up so let me finish getting up some of this squash and uh we'll go over to the harvest area and take a look at it yeah they're beautiful honey well this is just the first day first harvest so we got enough for the first harvest let's head over to the um harvest area clean these up a little bit that's plenty enough for us her mama and our neighbor so let's go check it out well good morning homestead family it's been about three weeks since we first started the harvest our first little harvest we had about what about a half a bushel or so so in the last three weeks that harvest has steadily increased every week you know for the last three weeks today is 65 days since we started these uh squash from seed so as you can tell the um the squash patch is loaded it's full and as you can see that it pays off with the five to six foot spacing on the plants on the road because these plants at full maturity have cascaded out and they're actually starting to touch each other where it's just solid squash and if i had these in any tighter than that then um these plants would have been tangled up with each other and become leggy and less productive so this spacing that we just started out with might have looked kind of skimpy at first but it ain't no more but anyway today we're going to get a um pretty big harvest this is this is one that we're going to give to the soup kitchen to help the people that need some food and have some fun harvesting so let's get started [Music] wow what a beautiful harvest it is it's massive it's just massive yeah i would say that's called massive anyway um you said you wanted some squash so you're welcome well today the lord has blessed us again for the third week in a row with a table full of this beautiful squash and we're eating squash and putting up squash and sharing squash and everybody wins everybody gets some squash so we hope that you learned a little bit on this little journey on how to grow squash there's really nothing to it and um it's a very enjoyable vegetable very favorite one of the favorites of the uh spring garden so if you've never grown it poor give it a shot i'm i'm sure you can do it there's nothing to it you may not want this much but you know we maybe two plants yeah one garden one two two or three plants is probably plenty for a family of four we we just grow extra because we share it with a lot of folks and uh the soup kitchen we're going to take this up to the soup kitchen in a few minutes and share it with them and they feed a lot of folks in the area that are down and out and just need a hand up and we're blessed to be able to bless them so the the blessings in the in the giving not receiving right so anyway we hope our videos have brought some peace to your day some joy to your heart and tell me and me and nancy see you next time always remember buy us hands we are fed give us lord our daily bread amen have a blessed day wow they're gonna love it at the soup kitchen yeah yeah it's gonna be a lot [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Hollis and Nancys Homestead

Views: 174,597

Keywords: hollisnancyshomestead, how to grow squash for massive harvest, how to grow squash, growing squash, squash, how to grow massive amount squash, massive, huge harvest, harvest squash, growing guide, food security, garden, gardening, hollis and nancys homestead, hollis and nancy, complete growing guide, seed to harvest

Id: jBNxpEb0oXY

Length: 31min 41sec (1901 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 24 2022