Post-Debbie Blooming

Tropical Storm Debbie dumps much-needed rain on west coast Florida.  

Last weekend instead of gardening in St. Petersburg I visited a bunch of farms and gardens in California.  While I was away, Tropical Storm Debbie poured rain and blew 40-mile-an-hour sustained winds on my sprouts. 

Winter squash flower.

The tomatoes and some of the squash were slight uprooted when the water flooded the pots at the same time the winds pulled their plant bodies to the north, but I have re-set those plants.  The weather calmed and cooled and dried and this week we have blooms!

Cucumber bloom.

All of my squash and cucumber, which have been building flowers for two weeks, finally let it rip and began creating the nectar containers to attract bees and wasps and butterflies whose own persistent gathering of sugars also dusts the pollen from one flower to the next, causing these beautiful yellow blooms to mature into fruit: zucchini, and yellow squash, and cucumber.

Summer squash flower.  These are edible, too.

I cannot complain about the weather this summer.  So far, the heat has been tempered by both storms and unusually cool weather.  The rains have been regular and the night mild.  It's not a fair experiment if conditions are so different they do not reflect a summer norm.  But I'll take it.

In all, I lost three plants in the storm, one tomatilla that snapped in the wind, one tomato that did the same and one of the parsley plants recovered from Lakewood.  I have to watch the squash carefully as they absorb almost as much water as I can give them, drying out their pots almost every sunny day.  The remainder seem still to be working through the rain water from last week.

I shifted all the mature squash to the shelves and the repurposed rain barrels.  As the plants take on their mature shape and size, I will place them appropriately around the the garden space.  They have grown so much in just four weeks.

Until next week.

Direct questions to The Gardener.