Saturday, August 20, 2011

An embarrassment of gourds


Here's my gourd story, and I'm sticking to it.

In my post from April 18, I was all a twitter about the prospect of growing my spring garden from seeds and not from starter plants.

I purchased three seed flats and carefully planted several types of squash, cucumber, pepper and other delectables. I decided to try one little batch of a gourd seed mix. I carefully marked each section of the flat with its seed type. I faithfully watered and soon found the seeds bursting forth with small shoots. Once or twice I watered a little too much, but I was fairly certain that the seeds didn't "float" out of their assigned cubicles. I planted the small shoots and waited.

All summer the vines grew in resplendent glory. Yep. You guessed it.

Where I thought I had several types of cucumbers, I had gourds. Where I thought I had butternut squash, I had gourds. Where I thought I had acorn squash, I had gourds. Gourds to the left. Gourds to the right. Out of my gourd.

For the record, I got zero cucumbers and a handful of zucchini. A few yellow squash did manage to survive the gourd attack.

The photo is a sampling of my gourd harvest. Anyone have any good gourd recipes out there?

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