Picking More Zucchinis Along with Pumpkins and Cucumbers Growing

This past week has been crazy because I have been weeding my garden every single day trying to stay ahead of the growth of the plants in the garden.  Getting behind can be a pain because weeds will be growing faster than I can remove them.

By staying ahead I can work on other things in the garden such as laying down layers of mulch to block weeds, placing ropes on my bean trellis for my pole beans to climb, fertilizing many plants, and so much more.

This week was busy with weeding, but within that time I was able to get some zucchinis harvested.  I picked three today alone and there were many more growing on other zucchini plants.  Some of them actually had multiple zucchinis growing on them.  Since most of the plants had spent much energy to produce these zucchinis I decided on giving them some fish/seaweed emulsion to replace the nutrients that they lost.  It must have taken much energy to produce the ones below.

The longest zucchini weighed six pounds which I thought it would weigh a little bit more.  I am definitely not complaining though because they are all decent sizes.  The other two were close to equal in weight with five and 4 1/4 pounds.  You can see why I had to feed the plants that they grew from today.

As I was looking through my squash plants not only did I see plenty more zucchinis, but I also have a few pumpkins that are beginning to grow.  At the moment I have four that are definitely pollinated and one that I am not sure about.  It seems like each pumpkin plant has at least one pumpkin growing on it.  One vine actually is producing two pumpkins right now.

Pumpkin #2 from same vine.

Both the pumpkins above are growing from the same exact vine and are looking very good.  Another plant that I had to feed today in order to hopefully get much larger pumpkins from one vine.  This is not typical of a pumpkin plant to grow two on the same vine at the same time.

What can sometimes happen is that they grow one pumpkin in mid to early summer and then later grow another one in late summer.  I will just have to feed them a little bit more than I would normally a single pumpkin vine, but other than that there is nothing more I can do.  It is up to the plant to continue growing.

Now that is just one vine that is growing in the garden I have two others with pumpkins.

The last pumpkin is still just a little bit early to tell if it has been pollinated.  From the looks of it I would say that it was successfully pollinated.  In fact I gave all my squash plants today a good feeding because most of them are growing fruits which will absorb most of the plants nutrients.

I also found my first cucumber this year as well.  I took some pictures of small cucumbers that needed to be pollinated, but ended up just falling off the plant.  I guess one of them actually got pollinated and one that I happen to miss.  This can sometimes happen especially when they are hiding behind large leaves.

For the most part my garden is growing quite well and soon my tomatoes will start turning red and hopefully I will have no problem with the fruits when picking them.  I am looking forward to picking all my tomatoes this season along with everything else.

I also start growing my fall crop this season in plastic cups.  I am not growing them inside because I can leave them outside and they will grow much faster.  I placed them in a large tray and placed a screen on top of them in order to prevent birds and other animals from eating the seeds.