TOMATOES AND SQUASH

This year, I have focused on trying to grow as many food quality tomatoes as possible. In past years I have had fun experimenting with many different heirloom breeds. However, they tend to not be as hardy and reliable as the hybrids. Many purists will argue differently, blah, blah, blah. Every year I have grown tomatoes, the hybrids have outperformed the heirlooms by leaps and bounds. I went with mostly determinate varieties. These set the tomatoes all at once which is more convenient for canning and drying.

I planted a few varieties of summer squash this year. It was basically a hodgepodge of squash seeds I had left over from several seed packets. In this photo, my squash have just began forming flower buds. Most of the buds right are male flowers. The female flowers really start coming up a week or so after the male flowers have made their first appearance. After that each plant will have a healthy ratio of female to male flowers. Even an untrained eye can easily discern male from female flowers. Female flowers will have a little immature squash fruit at the base, where as males will not. Then there's the morphological difference between the stigma and the stamen which is slightly less obvious.