Salty Sam’s Fun Blog for Children
Number 479
Growing Winter Squash
Hello Everyone
My Auntie Alice started a new project with the children this week.
Bill, Bob, Emily – and Henry as well are going to be growing winter squash in her garden.
Henry’s parents are very busy working at the Rocky Bay Chip Shop.
Business is picking up as the tourists are starting to appear in Rocky Bay. He wanted to get away and have someone to talk to.
Auntie Alice has marked out a large bed for this project.
Winter squash are vegetables with the most amazing range of colours and shapes.
They can be many shades of orange and yellow. They can be a light sand colour and dark green. They can even be an eerie silvery-blue.
They can be streaky, striped, blotched and multi-coloured. They can have smooth skin or be quite knobbly.
They can be neat and small and quite cute. They can be enormous, monster-size vegetables.
They can have the weirdest and most wonderful shapes that you would not expect a vegetable to have.
They truly are great decorations for using at Halloween at the end of the summer.
Auntie Alice had been busy swapping seeds with people all over town over the winter so that she could have a good selection of mixed seeds to try out. And this is the time of year to get planting them. You have a little while yet to plant squash if you would like to too.
Summer squash is also sown at this time of year but summer squash like the patty pan will be ready to harvest around July whereas the winter squash will not be ready to harvest until September time.
You need to sow your seeds into pots and not trays or plugs. They need to be sown in May and planted out in June.
l think there will be children all over Rocky Bay growing winter squash this year. l hope this summer will bring good squash growing weather for them.
Auntie Alice explained to the children that not all of their vegetables would be easy to hollow out to make lanterns out of like pumpkins, but they could still draw faces on them with felt-tip pens. They could stick eyes on them too to make them into little characters.
But the squash would be so beautiful or magnificent that they would look nice even if they couldn’t be turned into pumpkin heads – l suppose that should be squash heads.
Blue Hubbard is very big and has an eerie, bluish-silver sheen to the skin and soft flesh so would make a good squash head for Halloween.
Squash grow well where summers are warm. They store well into the winter.
They can be roasted or put into soups.
They can be picked fresh when required but if you want to store them like the children do, you will need to pick them when ripe with plenty of stem still attached before the first frosts come.
They will need to be cured just like pumpkins. That means leaving them out in the sunshine for about 10 days. lf it is raining a lot, put them into a greenhouse for shelter – or somewhere similar.
lf you want to grow squash, remember to push the seeds into the potting compost sideways to make sure they don’t grow upside-down!
Sowing them into cardboard tubes is a good idea because the plants have brittle, hollow stems that are easily broken. Transfer the whole plant inside the tube into the garden and they are less likely to get broken.
lf you let the squash grow up a frame, the fruits won’t sit on wet ground and rot. The squash plants will need lots of food and water through the growing season – but water the roots of the plant and try not to splash the leaves.
The children are so excited. The seeds they sowed were out of a plain brown envelope so they don’t know what they will turn into until they grow.
They will be watching them carefully to see what happens as the summer unfolds. They will be watering their plants with lots of water as well so that they feel well-looked-after!
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Thank you!
And see you again next Fun Friday!
Love and kisses
Salty Sam
www.christina-sinclair.com
Bill and Bob’s Joke of the Week
Bob: What do you get if you divide the circumference of a pumpkin by its diameter?
Bill: Pumpkin Pi!
Salty Sam © Christina Sinclair 2015
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of material from this blog without express and written permission from this blog’s author and owner is strictly prohibited.
Links may be used to www.christina-sinclair.com
Picture Gallery
THE SALTY SAM NEWS DESK
This week, I telephoned my best friend Captain Jack.
Mrs Miggins answered the phone and told me that he was outside in next door’s garden.
When he is outside in her back yard he is usually tending to his raised beds where he grows his monster veg.
He was in the yard next door because the new neighbours had not long moved in.
They had brought all their furniture in using the Rocky Bay firm Stan Removals.
Now they had set up their cottage they were trying to make their back yard look nice.
At first, it looked a very sorry state because it had been neglected for a long time
Captain Jack had suggested that they buy some enormous tropical plants as the yard was so sheltered and the stone walls stored heat.
The new neighbours thought this was a strange suggestion for such a small yard and needed a lot of convincing – but Captain Jack said that it would work well.
He said if they put a mirror on the back wall as well and put plants in front of it, their garden would look even bigger.
They all went to the nursery together and Captain Jack carried some of the plants in his car because there were so many of them.
It was amazing how well they fitted into a small space and actually made it look bigger!
The neighbours were astounded.
Captain Jack said that in the middle of winter the plants should be protected with agricultural fleece or straw of even taken inside for a while if they were quite small and still in a pot if the weather got bitterly cold.
They thanked him for his advice.
Captain Jack had some old pallets in his boathouse that he gave them to make garden furniture out of.
Garden pallets are already treated to be alright left outside.
His new neighbours sometimes take in foster-care children.
Now everyone living there has a lovely space to sit outside in.
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Quick Quiz
With the new gardening season upon us, do you know about these safety tips relating to being out in the garden?
- Why should you lock away garden chemicals?
- Why should you always put your skateboard away carefully when you have stopped using it?
- Why should you cover staking canes with yoghurt pots filled with scrunched up newspaper?
- Why should you never leave a rake lying on the ground?
- Why should you put your garden furniture and trampolines away if possible when very high winds are expected?
- Why should people using lawnmowers with a cable use a circuit breaker?
- Why should you wear stout shoes when you are digging with a garden fork or spade?
lt’s the Weekend!
HOW TO MAKE A KNlTTED PlN CUSHlON
Find a really pretty button to decorate this cushion before you decide what colour to knit it – to show the button off nicely.
Or you may want to make it in a colour to match your sewing box.
Don’t leave pins in the cushion – leave them in their box when you are not working because if they rust they will mark the cushion and spoil it.
CUSHION (KNIT TWO)
Using 4mm knitting needles and white dk yarn cast on 19 stitches
Slip 1 (knit 1, purl 1) repeat the last 2 stitches to the end of the row
Repeat the last row 29 times ( 30 rows of moss stitch)
Cast off
TO MAKE UP
- With wrong sides together using over-sew stitching to sew around the edges
- Stuff the cushion just before you sew up the last seam
- Sew a button into the centre of the cushion
Please note that the material on this blog is for personal use and for use in classrooms only.
It is a copyright infringement and, therefore, illegal under international law to sell items made with these patterns.
Use of the toys and projects is at your own risk.
©Christina Sinclair Designs 2015
Quick Quiz Answers
- Why should you lock away garden chemicals? – because these chemicals can be very poisonous for children and pets so they should not be able to get hold of them
- Why should you always put your skateboard away carefully when you have stopped using it? – because someone might step on it and fall over
- Why should you cover staking canes with yoghurt pots filled with scrunched up newspaper? – because they could poke into your face when you bend over if you can’t see them
- Why should you never leave a rake lying on the ground? – someone could step on the bottom and the handle can spring up and hit their head
- Why should you put your garden furniture and trampolines away if possible when very high winds are expected? – because they can take off and act as missiles or land on roads and railway lines where they will cause a hazard
- Why should people using lawnmowers with a cable use a circuit breaker? – if they accidentally mow the cable they could electrocute themselves without a circuit breaker
- Why should you wear stout shoes when you are digging with a garden fork or spade? – if you catch your foot when you are digging, you will need to protect it – gardening gloves can protect your hands as well
