Plants for all

Just another plant science blog

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  • Garden 2026: Squash

    Greetings everyone! I hope you’re well. Welcome to this, the second post about this year’s container garden!

    Today I will just give a brief overview of our attempts to grow two squash plants in containers. Don’t worry, there will be plenty of pictures. If anybody has tips on growing squash plants, please feel free to share them! I’m new to this, so I am hungry for advice.

    As with the previous post, I must declare that most of these pictures were taken by my parents, since I am no longer around to take them myself. They have my eternal thanks for caring for the garden in my absence.

    Honeynut squash

    I’ve always wanted to try growing squash, but since our garden is limited to keeping plants in containers on the deck, I wasn’t sure if this would be practical. After some googling (since I don’t really know what I’m doing), I decided to try growing “Honeynut” squash. Basically, I really wanted to grow a butternut squash, but I had very limited space. I figured that since the honeynut squash plant produces smaller fruits, I might actually be able to get a few nice squashes, even if I have to keep my plants small.

    We grew our honeynut squash plant in a 15-gallon container containing standard potting soil. Unlike the tomatoes and eggplants we talked about in the last blog post, there is generally no need to start squash plants indoors (at least in our climate). We direct-sowed our seed outdoors in late May. Other than regular watering and a single fertilizer dose about halfway through the growing season, we didn’t give it any other maintenance.

    Growth started out fairly slow, but became increasingly rapid after about a month. We started see showy orange flowers in early- to mid-July. After flowering, the fruits rapidly grew to near full size, but they remained green for about a month before starting to change color (Figure 1).

    Figure 1. Our honeynut squash plant over the course of the summer season. These pictures were taken (in order) on: June 19, July 2, July 20, July 20 again, and August 31.

    As the fruits started to ripen, the plant’s leaves started to die back (Figure 1, last image). As I am inexperienced with growing squash plants, I was initially worried that our plant was kaput. However, we did manage to get two nice squashes from this plant in the end (Figure 2)!

    Figure 2. We got two squashes (top right)! (p.s. Look at all those beans… spoilers!)

    I would definitely try growing this variety again. However, the yield was quite low (only two squashes). There are two main reasons I think the yield was as low as it was, and they are both fortunately straightforward to address:

    First, our plant only had access to ~15 gallons of soil. This might sound like a lot, but winter squash plants get BIG – and can be seriously nutrient-hungry. Growing plants in an even larger container would give them more opportunity to expand and produce more fruit. More frequent fertilizing might also help to better meet their nutritional needs in a container setting.

    Second, we did not pollinate our plant by hand. Why is this an issue? Well… Honeynut squash is actually a hybrid of two squash species: Cucurbita maxima (including pumpkins and their kin) and C. moschata (including butternut squash and their kin) [1]. Both parent species (and the honeynut itself) are monoecious, meaning that individual plants possess separate male and female flowers [2][3]. In order to get full-sized fruit, pollen from a male flower has to fertilize a female flower. Here’s the problem: If you have only one plant, and the male and female flowers appear at different times, then the female flowers will not be pollinated! There are a couple ways we can address this issue. For instance, growing more than one plant would increase the odds that male and female flowers would appear at the same time. Alternatively, you could try storing the pollen from a mature male flower, and using it later to hand-pollinate the female flowers. (Oh, I like that plan! That’s a good plan…).

    Give me the Zucc!

    In addition to the honeynut squash, we also tried growing zucchini (variety: “Black Beauty”) for the first time this year. Zucchini belong to the species Cucurbita pepo. As such, they are not the same species as the parents of the honeynut squash, but they do lie within the same genus.

    Our zucchini plant was kept in a 10-gallon container, since I did not expect it to grow as large as the honeynut squash plant. Maybe it could have used a bigger pot…

    As expected (given the descriptions on our seed packets!), our zucchini plant matured much more quickly than the honeynut squash (See Figure 3 below). We went from sowing seed in late May to mature fruit in about 1.5 months! I daresay if we wanted to, we could have fit two zucchini crops into a single growing season. Maybe next year…

    As with the honeynut squash, our zucchini plant had a rather poor yield (only one mature fruit). It was, however, a prodigiously large fruit (Figure 3, last image). The reasons for our poor zucchini yield are probably the same as those for the poor yield of our honeynut squash: Our plant likely needed more soil, and we really should have hand-pollinated the flowers. We actually had loads of flowers, but only one of them bore us a mature fruit!

    As always, if anybody with experience growing zucchini has ideas on how to improve yield, I am all ears!

    Figure 3. Our zucchini plant throughout this season. These images were taken on: May 31, June 10, June 19 (wow, look how much growth occurred in just 9 days!), and July 16. That was a seriously large zucchini. Fortunately, it did not yet have any large seeds, and my family found a culinary use for it.

    Bonus: Sunflowers!

    I ranted enough about sunflowers last year, so I’ll just give a brief photo montage of one of our plants from this year. This was an “American Giant Hybrid F1” plant growing in a 15-gallon container. It got a bit over 8 feet tall and gave us a decent-sized seed head. I think our “Arikara” sunflower from last year was roughly the same height, but I don’t remember the seed head being quite so large.

    Figure 4. Our “American Giant Hybrid F1” sunflower at different growth stages. The left-hand image shows the plant as a seedling, at just a couple weeks old. The next three pictures show how the flower head developed from July 22 to August 1.  

    Figure 5. The seed head from the same sunflower plant on August 28, before (left) and after (right) knocking off the remains of the flowers to expose the seeds below.

    Figure 6. I couldn’t resist growing some “Chocolate Cherry” sunflowers this year, either!

    Works cited:

    [1] Hultengren, R.L., Wyatt, L., & Mazourek, M. (2016). A Suite of High-quality Butternut Squash. HortScience 51(11), 1435-1437.

    [2] Missouri Botanical Garden. (n.d.) Cucurbita moschata. Plant Finder. Retrieved September 26, 2026, from:  https://plantfinder.mobot.org/PlantFinderDetails.aspx?kempercode=e451

    [3] Missouri Botanical Garden. (n.d.) Cucurbita maxima. Plant Finder. Retrieved September 26, 2026, from:  https://plantfinder.mobot.org/PlantFinderDetails.aspx?taxonid=292206&isprofile=0&cv=5&mobile=0&source=return&index=2

  • Garden 2026: The Solanaceae

    Greetings everyone! I have been away from this blog for quite some time; Apologies. Moving, starting a new job, and getting settled in has kept me very busy.

    As previously alluded to, I will now share with you some of the plant stuff that I have been getting up to since the beginning of the year. In particular, I would like to share some information about this summer’s vegetable garden!

    I was fortunate enough to get everything potted up and growing just before moving out. My family have graciously continued to tend to the garden in my absence. They send me pictures, and I live vicariously through these. It makes me happy. Note: All of the pictures from the start of June onwards are theirs.

    As it is already mid-summer, the garden is well underway! This allows us follow our plants’ journeys from sowing to harvest, all in one go. Because we have many different things growing, I plan to spread things out over a small number of posts.

    The setup:

    As you will see, we keep all of our vegetables in pots on the deck, well away from the ground. This is due to the extremely aggressive population of whitetail deer (Odocoileus virginianus) in our area. Unfortunately, keeping very large plants in pots limits the amount of soil they have access to, which may stop them from reaching their full potential. However, this is the easiest way to keep our plants protected from predators.

    Now then! Here is a list of what we’re growing:

    • Tomatoes (2 pots “Black Opal”, 1 pot “Garnet”)
    • Eggplants (2 pots “Ping Tung Long”, 1 pot “Little Finger”)
    • Honeynut squash (1 pot)
    • Zucchini (1 pot “Black Beauty”)
    • Green beans (1 pot “Blue Lake”, 1 pot “Rattlesnake”)
    • Red asparagus beans (1 pot)
    • Sunflower (1 pot “Chocolate Cherry”, 1 pot “American Giant Hybrid F1”)
    • Grapes (2 pots “Marquette”, 1 pot “Concord”)

    As the title of this post suggests, we will be looking at our plants in the family Solanaceae (the tomatoes and the eggplants) in this post.

    Humble beginnings:

    We started our tomatoes and eggplants from seed this year. You can of course buy live plants from your local garden center in the spring, but ordering seeds online allows you to pick the exact varieties you want from a seemingly endless list. I also think that watching things grow from seed is more fun!

    This year, we are growing two cherry tomato varieties:

    1. “Black Opal,” which produces dark-colored fruit. We grew this variety last year, and it was very productive. So, it made a return this year!
    2. “Garnet,” which produces more traditional lighter red fruits. This was also chosen to be a high-producing variety.

    We are growing two eggplant varieties:

    1. “Little Finger,” which produces small, elongated purple eggplants. We grew this variety last year with success!
    2. “Ping Tung Long.” These plants produce eggplants which are darker in color and longer than the Little Finger eggplants. We chose these because they are advertised to be heat-tolerant. This is a must in our local climate!

    The downside to growing tomatoes and eggplants from seed yourself is that they require a long growing season. Depending on where you live, it may be necessary to give your plants an early start by sowing the seeds indoors. We started our seeds at the very end of March. Seeds were sown in small pots and kept under grow lights until the weather was warm enough to move them outside:

    Figure 1. Starting seeds indoors. Left: These were our plants on April 6. The pots highlighted in red are tomatoes (left column) and eggplants (right column). Right: Our plants on May 6. The eggplants are growing quickly, but the tomatoes dropped most of their leaves, likely due to edema.

    The eggplants did great indoors, but the tomatoes proved to be tricky. They germinated well and grew for a few weeks without issue. But then, the leaves started curling and falling off. They also developed fluid-filled blisters along the leaf veins and on the stem. You can see that the tomatoes in Figure 1 (right) are missing a lot of their lower leaves and look pretty sad. Based on these symptoms, I guessed that they were suffering from edema.

    This source explains edema well [1]. Basically, edema occurs when plants take up more water through their roots than the rest of the plant can handle. Water is normally lost through the leaves via transpiration, allowing the plant to maintain the correct balance of water in its body. If transpiration is not rapid enough, water builds up in the leaves and stem and can cause damage. Transpiration is slower when conditions are cooler or more humid than the plant can handle (such as inside a climate-controlled house).

    To combat this, I stopped watering, moved the lights closer to the tomatoes to increase the temperature, and added a fan (bottom of Figure 1 right) to increase the airflow around them. As they lost more and more leaves, I moved two of them to a faster-draining soil containing perlite, in an act of desperation. Despite this, I saw no improvement. At this point, I thought the tomatoes would surely die. Nevertheless, I began moving the tomato plants outside for a few hours each day to harden them off, along with my other plants. After a few days of this, the tomatoes began to visibly improve. By the time the tomatoes and eggplants were moved to their final 6-gallon pots, the tomatoes were looking considerably better:

    Figure 2. Tomatoes (top) and eggplants (bottom) after transferring outdoors to 6-gallon pots on May 15. At this stage, the tomatoes have a few new leaves and are starting to look less… dead.

    Taking off!

    At this point, I left the country and my parents took over the garden. Coincidentally, the tomatoes and eggplants did swimmingly from then on. Montage time!

    Figure 3. The plants on May 31. Tomatoes are in the back, eggplants are in the front. The tan-colored pot in the back row is a squash seedling… more on that later. The tomatoes are putting out new leaves, and seem to have recovered from their edema!

    Figure 4. The tomatoes (top) and eggplants (bottom) on June 14. You can see some yellow flowers on the middle tomato plant at this stage.

    Figure 5. Flowers started appearing on the eggplants (this is a Ping Tung Long eggplant) in late June (this picture is from June 21).

    Figure 6. Ripe fruits on the Little Finger eggplant (left), and unripe fruits on one of the tomatoes (I am not sure which one, right!). Picture taken on the 20th of July.

    Figure 7. A harvest of Ping Tung Long eggplants and Black Opal tomatoes, on the 29th of July. One of the Ping Tung Long plants is generating lighter-colored fruits (top of the plate), which is odd. We shall have to keep some of the seeds to see if this trait is inherited!

    As of the writing of this post, the eggplants are producing well, and the tomatoes are finally starting to ripen. The eggplants might start to slow down towards the end of summer, but the tomatoes should continue to produce until the end of the season, as they are indeterminate varieties. Let’s see what happens!

    Work Cited:

    [1] Pundt, L. (2024). Intumescences (Edema) on Greenhouse Tomatoes. UConn Extension, College of Agriculture, Health, and Natural Resources. Retreived August 2, 2026, from: https://extension.uconn.edu/publication/intumescences-on-green-tomatoes/

  • A wild Arabidopsis has appeared!

    I apologise for neglecting this blog for the past several months. Though I have been absent, please rest assured that there was plenty of plant stuff happening behind the scenes. Hopefully I can fill you in later.

    Since my last installment, I actually moved to the UK for a job in my field! So I get to do even more plant stuff… but I can’t tell you about that yet.

    What I can tell you about are these fine Arabidopsis specimens that I spotted growing in the sidewalk in Sunderland! At least I think they are… there are some lookalikes… but I’m fairly confident my ID is right.

    Figure 1. A wild Arabidopsis plant with some parts labelled. Arabidopsis grows by making a compact rosette of leaves. After a while, flower stalks grow upwards from the centre of the rosette. In this plant, the rosette is no longer visible. It is at a late stage in its life cycle: flowering and setting seed!

    This plant might not be much to look at, but Arabidopsis thaliana is a very important species in plant research. Why? It is compact and has a short life cycle, meaning that it can be grown quickly and in very large numbers in a small amount of space – which makes it very practical for laboratory study (easy to have more replicates, yay!). It also has a small genome, making genetics studies easy. Furthermore, it is fairly closely related to crop species in the Brassicaceae family… think cabbage, broccoli, turnips, rapeseed, etc. This means that findings in Arabidopsis can allow us to make educated guesses about the biology of important crop species.

    Here’s another Arabidopsis which is even further along in its development. It has no flowers at this stage, only siliques. The plant is beginning to die and dry out. Seeds mature as the siliques dry. Once the siliques are fully dry, the slightest force (wind/touch) causes the outer walls of the fruit to detach, allowing the tiny seeds inside to disperse.

    Figure 2. An Arabidopsis plant with more fully developed fruit. Developing siliques (which still contain seeds) are juicy and have some green color left. Mature, dry siliques open and drop their seeds, leaving the lighter-colored core of the fruit behind.

    Some of these seeds will hopefully find a nice crevice in the sidewalk to settle down into… and the circle of life continues! Arabidopsis seeds are tiny, so they spread around pretty easily.

  • Our Haworthia is flowering!

    The stem was so long that it couldn’t support itself…

    Some flowers up close!

    And this is the rosette what did it:

    Have a good weekend!