Since sowing our first sets of Contender bush beans on March 12, I have reconstituted our warm-season plantings four times, resulting in a landscape completely different than that of early March — and certainly one far removed from what I conceived in winter, when all there is that needs doing is cooking up best laid plans.

Looking back, I jumped the gun planting so early this season (an overreaction to planting so late last year). I stuck my first seeds in the ground when the temperatures were too low for the young sprouts to thrive.  This lack of vigor left them vulnerable to the woodlice that were still thriving in the spring rains, as well as to the numerous young grasshoppers whose voracious nibbling the first-round edibles were not able to withstand.  Several attempts to reign in the grasshoppers failed, and the second round of plants followed the first into a hundred tiny bellies.  By April the weather had warmed sufficiently to coax the rabbits and squirrels out of their winter burrows, and the third wave of plantings, having had no time to mature, got eaten up after just a few days of foraging.

Thus, version 4.0.

The latest iteration differs from those that came before, having acquired several key adaptations in the grueling march of natural selection that has dominated this growing season.  Whereas my first and second attempts involved direct sowing of seeds in the ground, much of our current garden is potted so it could be grown close to the house, tucked into the zone we most frequent and can closely guard.  While little of the initial plantings were located in our front yard, much of the current garden resides there — far from the canyon and near where the frequent traffic of people and pets and cars deters the rabbits and squirrels.  And those plots that have been replanted in the upper backyard (we have yielded the lower yard, for now, to the varmints) are made inaccessible with floating row covers, which, while unattractive, have succeeded in keeping out the squirrels and insects where the fencing we’d used in earlier plantings failed.

At this point, it’s not about aesthetics.

I have also introduced a few new varieties of squash, including several heirlooms that are native to the west, in the hope that an uncommon, traditional type might prove resilient and endure to harvest — perhaps possessing an adaptation that can compensate for the slow evolution of a novice grower.  These include Sibley and Golden Hubbard squash, as well as Calabasa de las Aquas, Mayo Kama, and Navajo Gray Hubbard.  These last I acquired through Native Seed Search, a site that specializes in “aridlands-adapted heirloom crops”.

So far, so good — though I hesitate to tempt fate with such a rosy assessment.  Many of the vegetables I have recently planted need 100 days or more to mature, which puts a lot of time between now and picking and eating.  But in many other climates we’d be working against a hard deadline of declining temperatures, and at least in San Diego we hardly ever do that kind of deadline.

There’s still time.

Sunday we decided to finally do something with a few of the Delicata Squash that have been ripening in a bowl on our counter for about four weeks.  I have been extremely skeptical of how edible they’d turn out to be because they were grown way out of season, and for the last few weeks of that time they sat on plants sickened first by a massive aphid infestation (see Convergent lady killers, posted Nov. 17) and then by powdery mildew — the same pest that kept all the other out-of-season winter squash from producing and killed them (see Death by a billion spores, posted Oct. 15).

So, I harvested these squash not because they were ready, but because the plants were dead or dying.  Not a confidence builder in terms of quality.

We cut a few of them up, and they looked and smelled like squash should look and smell.  The recipe called for carrots, which we were able to pull from the yard, too.  And we threw together a salad made from greens from our garden as well as from Paul and Amy’s.  It turned out to be a flavorful and hearty soup, more so than the split pea we made a month or so ago (see A whole meal of food, posted Dec. 8).

I have never been reticent about sharing the food we grow, but since I started this calorie-counting effort, I can’t help but to — just for a second — think of the shared food as calories lost.  The thought never lasts because I enjoy giving food I’ve grown (especially when it tastes good).  In truth, the people receiving the shared food have been more hesitant in accepting, often saying, “But you could be eating this!”  Friends also counsel us to just count the calories anyway toward our 15 percent (actually, until last night my wife had no idea we weren’t doing just that).  However, what other people eat doesn’t really have anything to do with our annual calories and where they come from.  It has to do with theirs.  But if they’re eating from our yard, it’s definitely local and raised responsibly — so it should be counted in some way.  Where everyone’s food comes from and how it is grown matters.  And, sharing the food we grow is part of the community side of this effort: people getting together to grow as much of their food as they can, eat it, and share it.  Ultimately, it’s not just about what I or my wife eat.

So we’re going to count shared calories, separately, as a way to acknowledge that responsible food that gets eaten is never wasted.

For about $8 you can buy 1,500 ladybugs.  Since August, I have released 7,500 in my yard.

Despite all of the troubles I’ve had getting things rolling in the garden this year, I have avoided dousing my edibles in chemicals to ward off or kill the pests.  It’s felt like a Pyrrhic victory, at times.  Sure, maybe a little chemical deterrent would have boosted my harvest and put more food on the table, but if I want fruits and vegetables that have been repeatedly sprayed with deadly herbicides and pesticides, I can always go to the supermarket.  The chemicals individuals apply to their household pest problems wash into the soil with watering, and wash into the water table, rivers, and ocean with the rains just as easily as those used by industrial farming operations.

An alternative to the chemical route is bio-control — applying the checks and balances that exist in nature to agriculture.  The plants, animals, and fungi commonly referred to as “pests” are often essential components of local ecology that have simply gotten out of balance.  They become pests when there are more of them than there should be.  Nature always balances, but not always on our schedule and not always in time to save the crop (one way of balancing is the over-sized population eats all of the crop, then starves or disperses).

I have a heavy infestation of aphids on half of my remaining squash.  I haven’t mentioned this last bunch of out-of-season squash because I didn’t want to jinx it (as if jinxing could explain all of my issues), but I have hope for my Delicata.  The failed Butternut, Pink Banana, and Acorn varieties suffered from similar infestations of aphids, and I had some success with the four packages of ladybugs I released then, though they didn’t stick around as well as they have this time.

The aphid population went from a few hundred to a few hundreds of thousands in a week’s time.  Typically they’re kept in check by a variety of predators and diseases, and if left alone their numbers will eventually attract the things that feed on them.  A few ladybugs and lacewings had already arrived when I took my $8 to market.  But seeing as how aphids reproduce asexually, skip the egg-laying stage, and go right to live birth at the rate of 12 offspring per aphid per day, I thought a massive influx of predators couldn’t hurt.

A natural enemy of the aphid is the ladybug.  Despite its unassuming North American name (in Iran it is called the Shoe Cobbler, and in Finland, the Blood Gertrud), the ladybug is a voracious insectivore that devours as many as 50 aphids a day.  These beneficial beetles reproduce quickly, though not as efficiently or as voluminously as their prey (to be expected).  Yet, even in its several larval stages the ladybug feasts.  In some ways the immature ladybug benefits the eradication effort more than the adult in that it is flightless and less apt to wander off.  Introduced predators are under no obligation to accomplish anything on your behalf, much like Congress or bailed-out financial institutions.

And you can hardly tether the little bugs in place.  But, if there’s plenty of prey and somewhere for them to hide when things get tough, then they tend to hang around for longer.

Of the 450 species of ladybugs in North America, the most common commercially available type is the Convergent Lady Beetle.  The natural habitat for this beetle ranges from Canada to South America, so it’s native, but large infusions of this particular species can disrupt local populations of unique regional ladybugs.  When buying ladybugs for bio-control, be sure they are pre-fed.  Since they are often collected while hibernating in massive colonies, if they haven’t eaten, they cannot ignore their instinct to disperse, and they will fly — even from aphid-infested plants — before feeding.

I deployed my recent surge of bugs five days ago.  By day two at least half had deserted.  Today there are still a few hundred willing to eat and mate with abandon.  They’re doing a heck of a job, but something tells me there are 1,500 more ladybugs with my name on them at the nursery.

R.I.P. Waltham Butternut, Pink Banana, and Table Queen Acorn Squash.

Powdery Mildew infects a variety of plants, but the cucurbits — the family of edibles that includes squash — are particularly susceptible.  The infection reduces yields, deforms fruit that does manage to ripen, affects flavor, and predisposes the host plant to other diseases.  Powdery Mildew is caused by any number of fungi in the order Erysiphales, but the most common for the cucurbits are S. fuliginea and E. cichoracearum.

The fungus is an aggressive sexual and a-sexual reproducer that is wind dispersed, hopping from leaf to leaf and plant to plant in the breeze.  Dry weather, as we have here in San Diego in abundance, helps the mildew get established.  It starts with the oldest plants first, working down from the crown leaves until the plant, stem and all, is dusted snow white with spores.  Infected leaves die, and the plant senesces prematurely.

Wetting plant leaves when watering can make them prime breeding grounds for this type of fungus — something that was nearly impossible to avoid with the raised beds I built.  Crowded plants make the transmission easier, and that is another quality of my garden: I packed the plants in and didn’t thin nearly enough for the space available, partially because I was so keyed up on producing something in the aftermath of my summer losses.  Also, raising my beds put my squash at the perfect height to catch the hot, dry winds that race off the canyon behind our property — the likely vehicle of the original spores.

Apparently the fungus can be wiped off, but this seems a dubious suggestion since the reproductive structures of this fungus are smaller than the eye can see, and my eyes don’t see that well anyway.  Most recommendations for treatment quickly turn to chemicals — at the same time that they note chemical treatment breeds resistant strains of fungus, in addition to secondary pollution of groundwater and humans.  When I originally researched Powdery Mildew, my plants had a mild infection and my reading led me to believe that established plants might not be adversely affected.  Further reading and my own experience has proven this to be … wishful thinking, at best.

My winter squash hang languidly from the planters, their leaves largely withered, browned and yellowed by a parasitic relationship with this fungus that is not mutually beneficial, as some pairings in nature tend to be.  The four butternut fruits stopped growing sometime ago, and the promising pink bananas have begun to wrinkle and wilt into themselves.

I think it’s quits for the winter squash I was so cocky about at the start of the fall planting.  This weekend I’ll cut them out and make room for the true cold season crops — the broccoli and the beets and the carrots — to get fat in roomier digs.

The Butternut, Pink Banana, and Table Queen Acorn Squash has had several weeks of robust growth.  Vines burst through the netting that covers my raised beds, climbing and unfurling 15-inch-wide leaves of deep green, the vines healthy with flowering female fruit.

But the squash that grew rapidly to the size of a sneaker have all but stopped, the growth arrested by something, many of them shriveling and softening and slipping off the vine.  It’s not a total loss.  There are several massive Pink Banana Squash that increase in size daily.  But our plans for Butternut Soup in the winter and the clipped recipes now seem presumptuous.

Of most concern is the lack of female fruit to replace what has been lost.  In squash these females have big flowers attached to perfect miniatures of the mature fruit, basically an ovary, on a short stem.  As of now, there’s nothing but fruitless male flowers, high on their slender stalks.  They stand tall and bloom, attracting hordes of pleasantly surprised bees with their out-of-season pollen.  Damn happy bees.

The most likely culprit, as far as I can tell from my reading, is insufficient pollination — which seems an odd problem for the sausage fests that are my raised garden beds.  This would never happen on a college campus.  Insufficient pollination can result in deformed fruits or fruits that grow a bit then die off, and it can occur even if there seems to be an ample pollinator presence (the damn happy bees).  Apparently the number of pollinators present can affect the ultimate size of the mature fruit, too.

What does this mean for me?

At any time over the next several weeks you may find me out in the garden, hand-pollinating the squash.  This can be done by picking male flowers, peeling the petals back, and then rubbing the exposed pollen over the female stigma.  Another, less aggressively sexual method would be to use a small artist’s paint brush to pick up some male pollen and then dust the female.  You have to be an attentive hand-pollinator, though.  The flowers open in the morning and are receptive for only one day.

The male squash flowers just can’t get it done.  I guess it can happen to anybody.

I came across the phrase that heads this entry in the writing of Eliot Coleman, a pioneering organic farmer.  Coleman farms in Maine, where the less than 10-hour days the phrase describes are not only low on light but also bitter cold.  The Greeks crafted the myth of Persephone to explain why their lands were less fruitful in the winter months.  According to the legend, Hades abducted Persephone and took her to the underworld to be his queen.  In her anguish, Persephone’s mother (and goddess of the earth), Demeter, refused to allow the earth to grow and fruit, essentially starving all of humanity.  Zeus negotiated the girl’s release, but a trick of Hades required that Persephone live with him part of the year.  Thus, when mother and daughter are reunited, there are bountiful harvests, but when Persephone returns to the underworld each year, all is barren.

San Diego doesn’t suffer under Demeter’s sorrow — a fact attested to by the fat, out-of-season squash that hang from my garden beds and the stubby watermelon that recently decided this would be a good time to set fruit and grow.  But those are a long way from edible.  As are the beets, lettuce, beans, carrots, and peas.  My next harvest will come in the traditionally barren months between November and February.

For us, these typically plentiful times are our Persephone months, and it’s hard to blame the gods.  Sure, I could invent some tale to explain away the troubles my warm-season crops suffered, but it seems more practical to chalk it up to inexperience and do better.  I mean, if we’re flush with fruits, vegetables, and nuts next summer, I’m not going to give credit to the gods.  I’m going to say, “I did it!  Look what I did!  It was me!”  So it hardly seems fair to dump these fruitless times on Hades because he thought some girl was smoking hot.  Nor on a goddess that grieved.  The problems with my warm season crop were not Greek.  They were more local than that.

I did it.  Look what I did.  It was me.

We’ll eat better.  Soon.

Returning later in the day I found that the squash had failed to secure itself; the tendrils curved slightly at the ends but caught on nothing.  The squash bumped ineffectually in the wind.  I grasped the thread-thin tendrils and hooked each to the netting.  They held, tenuously.  I noticed a Butternut vine having the same trouble with our chain-link fence, so I affixed some tendrils there, too, then left the squash to figure the rest out themselves (my work showing the plants the right way to grow finished for the time being).

I returned to the garden late in the afternoon, expecting to see that the squash had capitalized on my aid by twisting and wrapping until tightly fastened.  However, the vines continued to bob, the tendrils I’d touched blackened and shriveled.  Perhaps I’d handled them too roughly, or transferred to them some oil in my hands that the delicate wisps found caustic.

Whatever the case, by the next morning the vines had found their own way, tendrils held fast by a thousand twirls around.  Clearly the plants know how to apply their own hard-earned adaptations and need no pointers from me.

There’s no pretension in the name dropping above.  The point is to know something about what I’m growing, that it’s not just a bean, it’s a Kentucky Wonder.  Plants have proper names just like people, and not in a freaky I’ve-personified-all-my-plants-by-giving-them-people-names kind of way.  Most of the time when we eat a tomato it’s called “tomato” and that’s as far as we know it.  That kind of informality results not just in Big Farm monoculture, but the perpetuation of a single variety of tomato to the exclusion — and sometimes the extinction — of all others.  Such a lack of diversity is problematic, not just in limiting our access to a variety of flavors within a single type of food, but also in a very basic, Darwinian sort of way.  A lack of genetic diversity within a species is a precursor to extinction.  Fretting over the loss of a single squash variant may seem a bit academic.  For a better explanation, watch the TED Talk below.

Today we are losing unique edibles like we’re losing languages, and those edibles that are truly unique have a cultural significance not unlike the native tongues that first described them.  One thing we can do is support and protect genetic diversity by growing heirloom plants in our gardens.  Not a radish lover?  There are 20 varieties available at a single retailer of heirloom seeds.  Maybe there’s one you like.  Maybe the only way to get the chance to eat it is to grow it yourself.

I had inklings that something was off winter/summer-squash-wise before the friendly lady at the nursery clarified the meaning of “winter” for me (I thought I knew).  The dozen or so varieties of squash seed all hit the racks at the same time, and they all suggested I “plant after last chance of spring frost”.  And they all are labeled a “warm season crop”.  But some of them are called winter squash.  I’m wary of this not being the last such nomenclature revelation in this green-living adventure.

So, I have 17 oblivious winter squash seedlings sprouting happily throughout my yard.  Right now.  They are the best performing of my burgeoning winter crop, despite being four months behind schedule.  Honestly, I have been pinning my fall-calorie hopes on these tardy plants.  And really, there’s no turning back at this point: We must grow and eat winter squash in winter.  Maybe they’ll work out and we’ll be eating squash through March.  We don’t do winter here like other places do winter.  Almost every planting guideline I’ve read on the back of seed packets and in books seems to have been written for places with seasons.  And that’s just not how we roll in San Diego.