Mutant Fruit and Mystery Plants

Well, we are finally getting some fruit out of our garden with the squash plants as our winner. There are several cucumbers, but they've been a bit slow going and could use a couple more days. And then there's our first zucchini (Amber just told me we now have three). Other than that, we have flowering buds on our tomato plants and some good signs from our peppers but nothing to get too excited about.

In keeping with the Old Testament notion of giving the firstfruits, I had to come up with someone to give our first squash too (Amber thought this was extremely weird). So, I finally decided to give it to one our pastors who has his own amazing garden and is heading up our church's urban farm. In fact, the night I picked our first result (last Friday), the urban farming initiative in Pittsburgh was having a fundraiser at a local bar. So, I took my fresh squash with me and offered it to my pastor and let him know I self-pollinated it too - which he thought was hilarious, and a person who overheard what I said, high-fived me and said, "Well give him a cigar!"

In the process we've managed to have some curious results. First, a couple weeks ago we noticed a plant was growing out of our compost pile - not a bad place to grow, mind you, as the soil there is probably the best out of our entire back yard. Nonetheless, we're not quite sure how the seeds go there and aren't 100% positive what the plant actually is. However, from the looks of it, the plant is probably a cucumber seed and must have gotten there as a result of us throwing some scrap piece of cucumber on the compost pile some time ago. Additionally, we acquired an odd looking squash fruit that managed to, so it seems, allow a whole new stem of the plant grow along with it right down its side. Not actually sure how this happened, and I've never seen it before, but perhaps it was the result of some wacky cross-pollination I did when trying to self-pollinate the plants!