Emerging Acorn Squash and Pole Beans

My squash patch is doing quite well now. Several acorn (winter) squash have started to appear, and it looks like there's many more on the way. By late fall, I am hoping that a reasonable harvest is possible. I do need, however, to now guard against the onslaughts of marauding squirrels, as well as several of my Twitter friends (heh heh heh...you know who you are! :-).

Here's one of the growing baby squash. Note that the squash vine has become so long, it's left the boundaries of the garden proper, and is happily invading the lawn:



This particular plant has become so large, I've decided to name it "Audrey", after the notorious, carnivorous house plant in Little Shop of Horrors. "Feed me, I'm hungry," Audrey usually says to me most mornings....



It's hard to believe that all this came from the seeds of a single acorn squash I bought in Stop & Shop last fall for use in our Thanksgiving Day meal. Had I simply discarded the seeds along with the kitchen scraps, none of this would be happening in my garden right now. What a waste that would've been, and a failure for sustainability and the concept of locally grown foods. (No, I am no joking about that...I take these matters rather seriously, in fact).

My pole beans are also proliferating. When my collards from last season bolted and finally died, I collected their seed pods and tied their stalks together to form a natural trellis, and planted three varieties of pole beans around them. This is what is looked like as of this morning:



Of course, it would've been nicer if they were farther along, but I should have plenty of nice long pole beans by the fall. I thought it was a good way, though, to utilize and re-purpose the collard stalks, rather than just simply cutting them down.