Farm Friday, October 18th, 2024
Fred, the zucchini, was promiscuous
Fred the zucchini did not have zucchini babies.
We have a seed library at our school. It is there in the regular library and it includes dozens of kinds of seeds you can “check out.” You can return the seeds by growing the plant, then saving the seeds, and then bringing the saved seeds back to the library for us to repackage and give out next year. Or just take the seeds and grow your garden. It is fun.
On the farm, we try to grow all or most of the varieties we give out in the library. That way we can test out the seeds and teach about seed saving when children visit the farm.
I think we were too ambitious last year.
In the summer of 2023, our garden was a riot of variety. Instead of narrowing down to a few varieties of crops, we did all of our regular vegetables as well as samples of each of the seed library varieties. Oops.
In the pumpkin/zucchini species, we grew three kinds of zucchini, one type of squash, and a pumpkin that has green stripes and edible seeds. These are all bee-pollinated and bees don’t seem to care which variety of flower they go to.
We confidently did activities with students to save the seeds from a zucchini variety called “Cocozelle,” which is an Italian…
