It has been more than 120 days ago since I have started growing this plant in May. This was the time where the slugs were still high fiving over everything that I took outside and went to make a feast on it.
The end of April and the beginning of may is the time where you start out by growing your seeds inside the house, because outside there is still a chance of frost.
Soaking them in water for a couple of days, putting them in a small container with soil and turning the plant every day towards the sun so it doesn't grow crooked. These guys really needed some attention.
Finally after a while it was time to take them outside and leave them to it, just giving some additional water here in there. I had started some zucchini seeds and some pumkpin seeds and they were growing nicely.
We all know how the most of my small plants ended up as I had written about here and also here
One plant remained half eaten but it survived. My zucchini plant. As I thought it was it was a zucchini plant
Growing on a string!
Still the battle of the slugs remained in there. Every now and then I would find a leaf half eaten and I did all kinds of things to prevent it from happening like mkaing beer traps and throwing coffee around it. When the slugs would just eat the leaves it would be fine, as long as they would stay away from the core from where the growth is starting.
You can see the slugs trails popping along, but the core was still intact from where the little tentacles would grow. The leaves were hairy and a bit stingy even when touching them.
The plant needed some support growing up as it was starting to grow really fast. I put some old bamboo as support as well as that the tentacles would attach themselves to the growing rack. Everything for the zucchini was starting to look as if all signals were on green.
The start of the forming of the bulbs was also forming. What I read in my app is that you always get the forming of male flowers first and then later on the forming of the female flowers. When the female flowers open up for just a couple of hours, a bee has to swing by the male flower and also then swing by the female them for proper pollination.
You can also do this pollinating by hand as it was actually very easy.
Here you can see a male flower with his little stem. It is about that stem which has then pollen on there that need to go into the female flower.
But....huh??
And I was getting ready for the big process! Zucchinis after being pollinated start growing super fast and in a week you can have a proper zucchini ready to eat. Don't wait too long for harvesting as they will develop more seeds and loose more taste.
Timing seemed to be crucial in all of this, but hey...I was ready for it. Here underneith you can see a female flower with a little bulb forming. When the flower opens up and is pollinated, then the fruit will start to grow.
But I didn't see the turbo growth of the zucchini of becoming a giant in a week. The fruit just seemed to get fatter and fatter and more round. Nothing like the shape of a zucchini.
And that is when I started doubting myself. Was this the zucchini plant that had survived the slug attack? Or could this also be the pumpkin plant and that I had mixed them up inside when they were still seedlings?
Crap....
I went for some investigation and it turns out that zucchini and pumpkin are from the same family and they look very much alike in the growing process. The hairy stems and leaves, how fast they grow, the male and female flowers how they look and open up. Everything is nearly the same so there are still not a lot of clues on what kind of plant this is.
The waiting game has started
But for now still after the pollination process the growing is still slow and the fruits look a little ball as you can see down here. This makes me think that this is a pumpkin plant and that in a month or so the fruits will start to turn orange and I will have a crapload of soup for the autumn time.
Honestly....I am still not 100% sure of what this will become, so the mystery remains. But for now....I will say 'the pumpkin plant is growing nicely' instead of that 'the zucchini plant is growing nicely', which I said all summer.
To be continued!