When To Remove Summer Squash in the Garden
Summer Squash Varieties
A popular crop to grow in the vegetable garden for many years is varieties of summer squash. Some of our most popular summer squash crops include our patty-pan squash varieties known as Sunburst and Bennings Green Tint. The Sunburst variety is a hybrid that produces a great yield of fruits that are bright yellow with small green rings around the center. As an All American Selections winner, Sunburst has more of a nuttier flavor profile compared to other summer squash varieties. The Bennings Green Tint is an heirloom variety that is also very productive and is highly credited for being the best tasting summer squash variety. Another popular variety is the hybrid, Goldprize Squash. This squash is a straightneck variety that is highly productive in the vegetable garden. The goldprize variety contains an excellent disease package that is resistant to several common mosaic viruses. Also, the Eight Ball variety produces perfectly round fruits with an excellent nutty flavor and firm texture. Along with our various squash varieties, we offer Golden Delight Zucchini and Spineless Beauty Zucchini. The Golden Delight Zucchini is another hybrid variety that contains an excellent disease package and maximum productivity with plant longevity. While the Spineless Beauty Zucchini is known for its spineless petioles that do not leave an itching sensation during and after harvesting in the vegetable garden.
Growing Summer Squash
When growing summer squash in the vegetable garden you can either direct seed or transplant, but we highly recommend direct seeding squash varieties. Since squash varieties are susceptible to a couple of plant diseases like downy mildew and powdery mildew we suggest using drip tape irrigation to help control some of these disease pressures from causing issues in the vegetable garden. If you experience excessive heavy rainfall using our Liquid Copper herbicide this will help reduce disease pressures and plant moisture buildup as well. When planting summer squash, we prefer to plant seeds every 12 inches along the garden row. After seeds start to emerge, we thin to one every 2 feet to establish plenty of room for plant growth. Once the summer squash is fully mature we can get multiple harvests throughout the growing season. To ensure fruits do not become too large or lose flavor we prefer to harvest every 2 or 3 days to collect all the mature fruits.
Removing Summer Squash from the Garden
On this week's episode, Travis shares a couple of tips to know when you need to remove summer squash from the garden area. Around the middle of May, Travis planted a Goldprize squash variety that has been providing maximum production in the garden throughout the growing season. However, when the squash varieties start to get older they will start to decline in production and will begin to create problems in the garden if they are not removed. The decrease in production is the first indication that the squash is starting to become old plants in the garden. The second indication the plants are older is you will start to see an increase of diseases affecting the leaves on the plants. Squash bug eggs will develop on the leaves and pickle worms will start boring holes in the side of the fruits leaving them damaged. Leaving the summer squash in the garden will end up causing diseases like fungal spores to overwinter causing problems to develop in the future vegetable garden area. Overall, when summer squash is mature it is best to go ahead and harvest the varieties before they allow disease and pest pressures to take over your vegetable garden area causing several problems in the future.