Winchester Farmers' Market

Most the our surrounding towns have had farmer's markets for years. Lexington has one on Tuesdays; Arlington has one on Wednesdays; but our town doesn't have one; or didn't until today. The farmer's market opened for the first time, over protests by the chamber of commerce. Some local businesses complained that it would bring in competition. Isn't that what business is about? Some complained that it would take up parking spaces where they planned to locate it. I might point out that our town is pretty dead and there is lots of parking on the weekends. So the market which was supposed to be in the parking lot next to the town green, was moved to the town green proper after a promise to reseed the lawn if it got messed up from all the people.

So my daughter and I took a trip there this morning in search of the first local strawberries of the season. The place was humming. A little band was set up and played for the crowed as they shopped and had picnics on the grass. It was indeed harder to find parking than usual. We walked two blocks to the town center (oh the horror). I'm thinking the businesses are happy now since I saw many people carrying packages that were not just from the farmer's market.

There were not many vendors at the farmer's market. There was a vendor that sold coffee and tea, one that sold fish and four that sold herbs, fruits and veggies. I was shocked that three of the vendors had almost ripe greenhouse grown tomatoes. I bought two. They will ripen on my counter for a couple of days. And they all had strawberries. Jackpot. Supermarket strawberries suck compared to the ones grown around here.

Garden Update

As I posted last Sunday, my zucchini is stupid. It sent out a female bloom almost a week before any male blooms opened. After the first zucchini whithered up and died, it has learned its lesson. The second female blossom has opened along with a plethora of male blossoms. Not only that, but my yellow squash has also sent out about four male blossoms. I wonder if they talked it over before hand. "Is June 14th a good day for you to blossom? Yup, I can do that, I'll mark my calendar." It is strange to get such a massive display from both plants on exactly the same day.

The snap beans are just starting to twine around their poles. The foot long beans are a little slower and haven't started vining yet.

Yesterday I ate my first cucumber. Today my second. They are wonderfully crisp and sweet, though not very big. They are pickling cucumbers and covered in a multitude of tiny little spines. I run the back of a knife over the skin to take off the spines.

The flea beetles on my eggplants don't like the traps as well as the Asian green flea beetles did. I have to coax them into the liquid. Its not hard. Just run my hand over the top of the plant and shooing them into the trap. Each time I'm in the garden I do this 30 second chore.

Yesterday was a big weeding day. I weeded the whole veggie garden. It was a beautiful day so I used the weeding as an excuse to stay in the garden longer.

Today I watered the garden. I didn't want to since it will probably rain tomorrow morning, but my plants are starting to wilt. I had to put the sprinkler on top of an upside down trash barrel. The peas are so tall, if the sprinkler wasn't raised up, they would have blocked the water.

The lettuce I harvested two days ago is not really bitter like I expected. It is actually pretty nice. I had a good salad for lunch that included the following from the garden: lettuce, mizuna, dill, cilantro, and cucumber. Yum.

War or Peace?

I'm growing caterpillars in my garden. Usually when I see a caterpillar in the garden I go into war mode and get my favorite implement of destruction - a rock. I leave the smooshed caterpillars out for the birds to eat. But when I see caterpillars on my dill, I change tactics. I leave them. "Why" do you ask? Swallowtails love my dill. I wasn't sure that the little larvae I saw three days ago was a swallowtail larva. It looked nothing like it. It was about 1/4" long and its front and back where black and had a white ring around its middle. But I let it live, just in case.

Now in just three days he is an inch long. In the photo, the one at the top is about two days old and the one at the bottom is about three days old. And as you can see, the older one has his true colors (at least I think he won't change too much) . He looks like a black swallowtail.

Right now I have about 10 caterpillars eating my dill and more keep hatching. I'm hoping the birds don't get them. I love the swallowtails flittering around my garden. They are more than worth the price of a little dill.

Alas Poor Lettuce. I Knew Him Well.

Well this will NOT be the year forever known as the year without peas. Yesterday only got to 87F and guess what? My peas started setting fruit in the cooler weather. Well maybe 87F isn't cool but it was 10 degrees cooler than the day before. I'm thrilled. I'm psyched. I was doing my happy dance in the garden this morning and the neighbors thought I was nuts.

I'm guessing no one was around to see me start crying the next minute, or they would have talked to me about therapy options. My peonies that have been only blooming for four days have started to die. NO they are not allowed to do this. I have a stunning photo of one of them ready for bloom day this Sunday. Surely they could last a week, but no, there is only one flower left on that plant and it is on its last legs. Sob. And my lettuce is bolting. Yes I have not dug up one full head of this kind of lettuce yet, just the thinnings. I was looking forward to the first one. I have photos documenting its wonderful progress. I give them to you here as a eulogy. Poor lettuce. You were greatly loved. But you would have been loved more if you hadn't started bolting. Sniff. I should have thrown the dying peony petals over their corpses in farewell. But of course I didn't. I picked them. I'm going to eat them anyway through bitter tears (or bitter leaves I can't tell the difference).

Online Gardening Communities

One of the fun things about blogging is not the blogging, but reading other people's blogs. Right now I'm fairly focused on gardening blogs. I will read other articles, but I come back to the gardening ones. I found my first few by searching the web. Then to find other blogs I've played a game called "Follow the Commenter". It is a simple game to play. Take one of your favorite blogs and see who has commented on a post. Follow the link to their blog. Their blog may or may not be a gardening blog, but it is fun to read it anyway to see who reads the same blogs you do. If it is a gardening blog, pick another commenter from the new blog. Follow it. And so on, until you've lost the gardening theme. Sometimes the chains can last a long time, or they can loop. Either way you can waste hours of your life playing the game.

I've tried other ways of finding blogs. There are blog lists all over the web. Some are little communities of like minded bloggers. Blotanical and MyFolia seem to be the two specifically garden related communities. I tried MyFolia, but it seemed like so much work. Writing my blog is enough work. If I have to keep adding plants to my garden (they want you to add all your plants to your plot on MyFolia - dang do you know how many plants I have?) and journal on their pages, it just isn't worth it to me. It seems like it would be better for someone that doesn't already have a blog.

Blotanical is much more to my taste. It takes the blog you already write and links to your posts. No extra work required. My kind of place.

One flaw is that it is set up a bit competitively with its point system. I understand why they do it that way, but I'm not a fan of fostering competition in a community. It also has a hard to use user interface. I really wanted to fav someone (pick them as one of your favorites) and I had to look up in the faq how to do it. It should be much easier. I also wanted to get to someone's plot. I had to look that up too. A few extra buttons/links are really needed. I could go on about some of the other flaws, but I used to be a programmer and always see the flaws in the software.

That being said Blotanical is a fun place to hang out. The people there are nice and usually a handful of people welcome you to the site, so you can start a conversation right away if you like. My most used part of the site is the Picks tab. It lets you see all the most recent posts. So anytime I need my gardening blog fix, there it is.

Dill, My Insectary

I was so happy this morning as I looked at my dill. I have a green lacewing on it. I haven't had lacewings in my garden for a long time. They are wonderful garden helpers, eating aphids (at least their larvae does). I don't actually have a lot of aphids yet, but I will. They started coming out last week, but only in ones, not in clumps yet. If my lacewing starts laying eggs you will see me do a little happy dance in the garden. Their eggs are really unique. Well the egg itself is just a small white dot, but it is held off the leaf with a long thin white stalk. The larvae would eat each other if they aren't separated, so mom keeps them from touching by putting each egg on its own stalk. Yes they are all given time outs in their bedrooms so they won't be mean to their siblings.

The dill is a great collector of insects. It attracts a lot of beneficials, but it also attracts caterpillars, and not the bad kind. I often get swallowtail caterpillars on my dill and parsley. Right now there are about three little caterpillars that are mostly black with a little whitish ring around the middle (sadly my camera wouldn't focus on the tiny things). I'm hoping it is some really pretty butterfly. Most of the time I don't even see them until they are bigger and notice that half my plant is gone.

Another insect I love is flittering about the garden, a dragonfly. I love dragonflies and damselflies. They have such beautiful little iridescent wings and bodies. There are two of them this morning sitting on the fence in the early morning sunlight. It must be why I have no mosquitoes in my garden this morning.

I find it amusing that the two posts I write about today are about how vicious mother nature is being to me and how nice. She really can show both sides of her personality at once.

Mother Nature's Revenge

We are on our fourth day of the uncalled for heat wave. Just when I smugly think my garden is doing well, mother nature decides to teach me a lesson. The basils that I bought a few days ago are getting hardened off, but not in a nice way. I watered them yesterday, but didn't want to go out in the evening to check them again. It was too hot. So my punishment this morning is wilted basil. I swear they were well watered. I even put them in a spot with afternoon shade. At least they perked up after a drink.

My peas on the other hand were wilting dreadfully all day yesterday. The top 3-6" were just pitiful. Then we got some strong wind and they were partially knocked down. I thought this variety only went to 24" so I didn't have tall enough twine. I fixed that this morning and while tying them up noticed that my peas had been burnt yesterday. If you look at the photo, right above the blossom, two of the leaf tips are black. Ack! The flowers aren't lasting and falling off. Of course it is too hot to set peas.

The peas are not the only burnt plant. My hostas are starting to get burnt too. I often plant them in full sun. I know; I know; they are shade plants and I'm just getting what is coming to me. They usually do extremely well in the sun. Our summers are not terribly hot, but the new foliage just can't take the early heat wave.

At least some plants are thriving on the heat. My cucumber has started setting cukes. The first two on this plant are shriveling up to die, but if you look at the photo closely, you can see the third node a cucumber has started growing. To complement my cukes, my dill is beautiful. I'm really hoping I get a lot of cukes before my dill goes to seed, but I suspect it won't be long. That will be my cue to make dill pickles. Yum.

At least the cucurbits will distract me from my dying peas. My neighbor said this will be forever known as the summer without peas, but I'm still holding out. We will get back in the 70s in a few days, and maybe they will revive themselves. Or am I just being overly optimistic?

My Monster

My zucchini is a monster, though it is zucchini so I really shouldn't be surprised. I planted it the same time as my yellow straighneck (puny bottom plant). I was deluded into thinking they would be fairly similar in growth habit. As little seedlings they grew similarly. The yellow squash was a little smaller, but I assumed that was because two seedlings sprouted in their newspaper pot where in the zucchini pot only one sprouted. They really weren't much different when they were planted out three weeks later. I pinched off the extra seedling of the yellow squash then so the strongest could take off. In the early race I had my money on the yellow squash. The zucchini wilted all day long. This is pretty normal in squash on hot afternoons, but not in the morning. It was wilted all the time. It was growing more leaves than its poor little roots could handle. I thought that would do it in. But I was so wrong. If one leaf died because of lack of water, two larger ones would take its place. Finally its roots caught up. My monster is alive.

My tomatoes are starting to form. (Insert noisemaker sounds here). They are just cherry tomatoes, but really cherry tomatoes are my favorites. These are only about 1/4 inch across right now and I impatiently wait. And wait....and wait...

Pretty In Pink

When I first posted about my peonies, someone asked me what color they were. I was stumped. I planted them last year and pulled off all the flower buds. Then I promptly forgot what varieties they were. I guessed they were pink, since it is one of the colors I'm drawn to in flowers. For years I've hated pink - except in the garden. Tastes can be funny that way. It is beautiful in the garden, just don't make me wear it. My tastes have since changed, at least for my clothing. Occasional pink is fine. Luckily for me I still love pink in the garden.

So yesterday I had a treat. They finally unfurled themselves and here they are in all their pinky goodness.

Flowering News

I have good news in flowers and bad news. The bad news is that the pea blossoms are indeed starting to bloom during our unusual heat wave. Also my zucchini is blooming. That doesn’t sound like bad news, but if you look closely at the photo you will see that the only flower blooming is a female flower. The males don’t look like they will open up for a couple of days. Maybe the heat will speed them up, but it looks unlikely. So this little zucchini will die. So sad. Later in the year I may be quite happy with female blossoms dying, but this is the first.

There is a lot of good news in blossoms. The first pepper flower opened yesterday; the tomatoes are blooming like crazy; the geraniums are blooming; the peonies are just starting to unfurl; the Kousa dogwood is in full bloom; and the dianthus (allwoodii alpinus) are flooding the yard with their scent.

I love the clove like scent of the dianthus. I grew them from seed about 15 years ago. I used to have lots of different sizes, shapes and colors from the seed, but only one plant has survived the years. I’ve since split the plant. Though very slow growing, it makes a fabulous ground cover, slowly creeping along. It blooms at the perfect time in the garden. Right after the lilacs quit blooming and scenting the garden, it takes over the task.

The heat was fierce yesterday and it will just get hotter in the next couple of days. I went out EARLY this morning to garden to avoid the heat. Yes I was up at 6am on a Sunday morning. It was quite pleasant for a short time, and then it started getting hot. I figured the lettuce really needed some relief. I couldn’t find an old sheet, but found some old unbleached muslin and used it to wrap the bean poles (the beans will provide shade once they climb the poles). I also covered the Asian greens with muslin. They certainly don’t like the heat either.

I also had to weed the fruit garden again. I really need to mulch this bed. Two years ago I missed a thistle blooming behind my grapes (grapes have since been replaced with blueberries) and ever since I’m constantly pulling little thistle seedlings. I also swear that I’m pulling up grape seedlings. I don’t remember ever pulling them up before. Maybe instead of mulching I’ll get some clover to grow there. I can transplant some from my lawn easily enough and it will spread well over time. But for now I pull weeds.

I harvested some dill to dry today. I had some that needed thinning out and it was quite a bit. So now I will have plenty of dill weed for the winter.

The Heat is Coming

I was sick yesterday so got nothing done in the garden. It is amazing the change in just two days. One of my impatiens disappeared. Was it a bird or cutworms? Who knows. Luckily I kept the extras from planting day. They are a little root bound, but they might be ok. I planted one. If it was a cutworm, then it will take that one down too and I’ll find him and plant my last one.

I also found a self-seeded basil in my garden. He was so cute. I moved him near my other basils since he will never be able to grow where he planted himself - right next to the compost pile (which is good) and at the drip line of the crab apple tree (which seems to be bad). I’m assuming the crab apple tree is why I can’t grow anything well in that bed. I’ve never heard of apple trees being allelopathic to anything other than themselves, but I can’t think of anything else that would effect plant growth in the area. I had trouble with another bed that was where I cut down a crabapple. It kept trying to regrow and send up shoots and I kept cutting it back. For the years that I did this, nothing grew well there.

My diakons were bolting. The weather has been fine for them and it is under the 60 days it should take them to grow to full size, I’m guessing they hated me pulling up their neighbors to thin them out. I did this less than a week ago. I’ve learned my lesson. Next time, thin early and the plants won’t bolt as easily.

I moved one of my Fun Jen bok choi. It is way too close to my other plants. I really have to learn to space these out more. I can’t plant them like lettuce and thin and eat as I go. I really like the plants full size, not baby size. While I was in the Asian green section, I harvested a tatsoi and a mizuna. Did you know mizuna has roots that are similar to radish, though purpley? I had no clue. I wonder if they are edible. Also while I was there, I also noticed ragged holes in my Chinese cabbage. My slugs are getting worse. I found an itty bitty one on one of the leaves and his mommy under the leaves. It may be time for beer parties in Asian greens.

The other harvest for the day is oregano. Sadly the plants were splashed on with the recent rain, so very dirty. I really don’t usually wash my herbs before drying (I never put anything nasty on them). But when they are dirty, I have to. Then I put them in the dehydrator for 6 hours. I probably didn’t need quite that long, but I was off at a function for that time, so had no choice. (And don’t worry what looks like condensation on the bottle is not, it is just oregano dust.)

The other order of the day was preparing for the hot weather. We are going to have 4 days in a row in the 90Fs. Yuck. Our average for June is 70Fs. We usually get a heat wave, but 4 days that hot is really usual. Sadly my peas are just starting to bloom. I really hope they survive the heat. The lettuce will hate it, so I thinned it out and mulched it. I thought about rigging up an old sheet to make shade, but didn’t have time before I had to leave. My hoop tunnel for the eggplants was still up, so I took that down.

More Mints

On June 2^nd, I talked about my mints and how I pulled them up. So I had to replace them. Yesterday I talked to some friends and found out that indeed they had spearmint. This was not what I was looking for. One of my friends came through and told me they had mint and several different kinds. So today I went over to raid their garden and find out what they had. They had spearmint in plenty and a little bit of pineapple mint and some weird fuzzy mint I hadn’t seen before and still don’t know what it is. None of them interested me much. They said there was peppermint in there, but I couldn’t find it. However they did have variegated lemon balm. How pretty. I took a sprig of that. I thought I got a little root but when I got back home I found I was mistaken. It will probably root in water. I will see.

Since my friends that live close couldn’t help me out at least with mint, I shopped around. I did find a lot of pineapple mint and spearmint. A couple of shops had varieties of peppermint, however I held off. I wanted some fun mints too, like chocolate mint. One of my commenters (Weed Whackin’ Wenches) said they had orange mint and that sounded so good. I really wanted it too. None of the shops had either of those two mints. I found a place on the web to sell them all to me, but required three live plants if they were going to ship. They also had a peppermint called Candymint that I wanted to try. So I ordered online instead. Sadly they are not scheduled to ship until the 16^th, so I’ll have to wait.

For instant gratification I bought other plants at the garden center: two basils and two thymes. I have my lemon thyme in the garden, but my French thyme died on me about 5 years ago and I’ve never bothered to replace it. So now I have both French thyme and English thyme. I like the French thyme better, but the English is hardier. For the basils I picked lemon basil (do you detect a theme of lemon flavored plants in my garden?) and Thai basil. The basil seed I sowed of lemon and holy basil never germinated. Well a few little plants did but they lasted about 3 seconds in the garden before something ate them. My new basils are now out in the garden hardening off. Hopefully they will last longer.

Since I didn’t take my camera with me on my journeys, I’ve given you more photos of the garden in the rain. It was another pretty but cool day in the rain, but I'm looking forward now to some sun. If only it would stay cool, but it is destined to get very, very hot this weekend.

The Rain

During some springs I dread the rain. These are the springs of drizzle. We get the same amount of rain as other years, but it comes slowly day by day. The sun never greets us in the morning and we don’t see the beautiful sunsets. At these times I pray for the elusive sunny day.

This spring has been the opposite. We have had rain, though it hasn’t come with a whimper but with a bang – sometimes very loudly. Occasionally the thunder has been more prevalent than actual rain and the wind has been destructive at times.

Today we are getting a more typical spring rain. It is gentle and kind to the garden. There is the occasional bowed flower head, but no seedlings are being beaten into submission, just life giving rain. I always think the garden looks so beautiful during the rain. Lines of water drip from the leaves and petals. The plants seem happy but quiet.

Baby Cukes

I have baby cukes! Ok so not quite, but my cucumbers are blooming and they are all female blossoms. I’m growing Diamant which is a parthenocarpic pickling cuke, so all female blossoms is not a problem. This variety seems to send out one female blossom per leaf node. I can only hope the little plant is big enough to actually set its cukes. I know it needs no fertilization, but I’m thinking that it is still a very small plant. I’ll be watching them closely.

I grow lemon thyme. It used to be golden lemon thyme, but the golden part has mostly faded away over the years. At the beginning the variegated yellow part was very strong then one year a branch sprouted out of it that was no longer variegated and that part is now the only surviving part of the plant. I bought another one this year and I was going to replace it but the old ones looks so more appetizing than the variegated one. I never ate the other one. It never looked particularly edible to me. I loved it anyway because of its beauty and its wonderful scent. I think I’ll keep them both, but the green one I’ll use as it is supposed to be used – as an herb.

The best time to pick perennial herbs is usually a short time before they flower (though frankly I’ll do it anytime) and always pick them in the morning after any dew has dried off. The fragrant oils are strongest at that time. So this morning I picked the thyme. When I picked the plant, I picked the stems and all. The stems will be easy to pick out once they are dry. The little leaves will fall right off.

I noticed my oregano could used to be picked too, but I only dry one herb at a time as I don’t want to mix the flavors together in my dehydrator. Oregano flavored lemon thyme is not what I’m going for. Tomorrow we are supposed to get rain so I may have to wait a few days for the oregano. I use a dehydrator because you lose more oils if you air dry the herbs. It is a very cheap one that I bought ages ago. I have herb screens for them which are just plastic inserts with holes in them – as I said, a very cheap dehydrator. It has no temperature control, but I’ve dried everything in it, from jerky to cabbage (once I was in charge of dehydrating coleslaw and some other veggies for a raft trip down the Grand Canyon) and of course herbs. Fresh herbs are best, but if you don’t live in an area where the weather is always beautiful, get a dehydrator, or even better have a friend with one and share.

The bad news on the gardening front is that leaf miners have invaded my chard. I don’t have this under a row cover and I should to keep them out. So I spent some time picking out all the little larvae. Then I turned each leaf over and dispatched the egg sacks that haven’t hatched yet. The egg sacks are tiny little white specks. They are very small, but since they are white they are easy to see.

Mints

A couple of years ago I planted two mints, white peppermint and spearmint, into my herb garden. I planted them in a half barrel sunk into the ground. I loved my peppermint and picked it all the time, but the spearmint was shunned. I like the smell, but I just don’t use it in anything. So the obvious happened - now quit laughing at me - the peppermint couldn’t compete well because I keep cutting it back. The spearmint is taking over. This year it has been so strong, it keeps trying to break its way out of the tub. Some of the ribs from the oak tub are starting to break up under the strain of its assault. The spearmint has to go. But how to kill it? I want to keep the peppermint, or I’d just dig it up. Should I take a cutting of the peppermint and then dig the whole container up or should I just work at ripping out the spearmint each time I’m in the garden?

Well I tried to find the peppermint to transplant some to a pot and could not find one stalk of it left. I’m sure it is there, but hiding under all the spearmint. So I just pulled it all up. I’m going to let it dry on top of the compost before adding it, so I don’t have a mint problem around the compost pile. Mint tends to be very invasive in my garden. My other mint family plant, Lemon Balm, does not tend to be a weed, so it is allowed to run free.

Unbeknownst to me Joel, my husband, was watching me yesterday while I planted my eggplants. He took this photo as I was putting the hoop tunnel back up.

Transplanting Eggplant

Today is the first of June, the day I chose to plant my eggplants. During June the weather usually stays above 70F (21C) during the days and doesn’t go below 50F (10C) at night. I checked the weather report just to make sure. I have a set of very healthy eggplants. They are four weeks old, but already too crowded for their space. The eggplant in the middle is the biggest and its roots are a little bit root bound. I planted only four of the five plants since that is all I have space for. I have about a 4’x 3’ area. So they are 18” apart in one direction and 2’ in the other. I’m a little worried about the spot. It used to be a spot in full sun, but this last year the oak trees in my neighbor’s yard must have grown taller. Now it only gets full sun later in the day. I hope it is enough for them. They are planted in black plastic under a plastic hoop tunnel. I’ll open the edges on the few hot days, but won’t take it off until our nights get warmer. I’ve never grown eggplants before, but everything I’ve read about them says they hate cool weather and if it gets below 50F at night they get stunted and won’t fruit. The average lows in our area won’t go up to 60F until July.

The variety that I picked was Slim Jim. It is an early Italian type eggplant and its fruits are small. Which is good since my family won’t eat eggplant and it will be small enough for me to eat. Of course the problem with that is that I don’t eat eggplant either. Hmm why the heck am I growing eggplant? I think because I’ve never grown it before; it was from Pinetree so the seeds are inexpensive; and it is such a pretty plant. Everyone tells me they taste better if picked early from your own garden, so I’ll try it. If not my neighbors will enjoy it. It certainly won’t go to waste.

After planting I checked out the garden. Everything is growing so well (except my Asian greens). The Sungold tomatoes (hybrid orange cherry) are a foot tall and have not one but two sets of blossoms already. Their stems are very stocky. Nights have been below 55F (13C) recently, which is low enough to kill tomato pollen, but I hear that Sungold is more cold tolerant than most tomatoes. Our forecast is for lows in the mid to upper 50Fs most of this coming week, so they should be ok either way. My Orange Blossom tomato (hybrid orange early determinate) is not doing as well. It was beat up by flying row covers in one of our 50mph wind storms of the spring. It’s recovering nicely, but still it was very unhappy for a while. My Aussie tomato (indeterminate heirloom beefsteak from you guessed it, Australia) is doing quite well too. It is a bit shorter right now than the Sungolds and you can just see the blossoms start to form.

My cucurbits are also doing well. The direct seeded pumpkins and cucumbers are just getting their first leaves. The zucchini plant is doing better than the yellow summer squash. You can already see its first little female blossom starting to form and a ton of male blossoms. The transplanted cucumbers (Diamant pickling cuke) are just starting to run. They were short and squat until a couple of days ago. Now they are getting taller. Soon I’ll have to take the row cover off of it to let it climb the trellis. It is parthenocarpic (sets fruit without pollination) so I don’t need to take the row cover off for the bees. It also has both male and female blossoms already. I think it is much closer to blooming than the zucchini though.