Doesn’t today’s title sound like the Nancy Drew books we used to read as kids? Haha! Well, when I discovered this plant, I felt a little bit like I was in one for a moment! If you have been around here at PH@H for a length of time, you might already know that gardening is one of my hobbies. I take into careful consideration where I plant each plant, and what time of year it goes in the ground. I use raised beds, as our ground here is full of rocks and clay. Well, call me surprised when I walked out in the garden one morning to find what I thought was a weed growing in the gravel.
I bent down to pull it out when I realized this was no weed! This was food!!! How on earth did it get there? And an even better question: What kind was it? After a little pondering, I saw that it had sprung up in the area where we had temporarily kept our chickens while we were building them a run elsewhere in the yard. As you likely also know, I throw all kinds of kitchen scraps to the chickie girls to snack on. These seeds must have gotten missed by the chickens and taken root!!! Now, to figure out what it is?? This is quite the mystery.
I thought about what I might have thrown to the chickie girls at the time of year they were housed there. The list is long, but here are the possibilities…I’ve even included links to some fun facts about each one for you:
- watermelon
- cucumber
- pumpkin
- acorn squash
- honeydew melon
- yellow squash
- cantaloupe melon
- butternut squash
- zucchini
This should be fun, right? It’s a real mystery right in my own backyard…literally! I decided I definitely needed to water this plant to see what it would become. So, that’s exactly what I did. And wouldn’t you know it, two additional plants that look the same sprouted up!!! Such luck!! The three mystery plants are growing very quickly, much to my surprise, and are just starting to grow their buds. Like any squash, melon, or gourd plant, these first buds are males, so bear no fruit. But there is ONE female bud on one of the plants already!! Take a look at the picture and tell me what your guess is????? Stay tuned to see if the plants keep growing, and if they do, to see what kind of fruit they bear!!!!! We are finding the joy, even in the garden!
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