Thanks Dave, I've already snipped off one each of the squashes. I'm probably going to leave the watermelon plants alone. They're both starting to vine and lay away from each other. I'm going to give them a good side dressing of fertilizer and let them do their thing. I don't expect much from these anyway since it's a long season variety planted late in the year. These were started as a seed germination test and I thought they would croak once put out in our heat. So far so good. Wade

Hi agngg, how are those plants doing now? It is a beautiful squash plant? It looks just like the Magda I am trying to grow. Right about the time of your first post I had some baby plants in the ground which showed splits in the main stem just like yours. I was relieved to hear it would not be a problem. My plants did not die but they have not done well either. The ones with the bigger splits wilt pathetically within minutes of strong sunshine suggesting that the stems cannot deliver enough water to the leaves from the roots. And all the plants seem quite small for the type from the descriptions in the catalogs again suggesting not enogh nutrition is reaching the upper parts. I don't think the soil is a problem because the two or three plants that did not split are doing substantially better. An update would be nice. Hi weirdtev, we meet again here. Are you saying that it is possible to transplant squash seedlings and plant them deeper than the soil line in the pots, up to their seed leaves? Wouldn't this rot the stem? I would be glad to have some reassurance on this as my new seedlings are somewhat leggy. Thanks, K.

BER can develop at any point on a fruit. The blossom end is most common but your photo is definitely BER. Dave PS: I 'think' that tagged as a FAQ means that there is a rather lengthy FAQ here (somewhere) about this question. And it is also a very common question posted. Problem is we can't seem to find the FAQs since the reorganization and even using the recalled titles of many of them don't pull them up with the Search as it used to. The search does pull up 50+ previous discussions about this but no FAQ.

You might want to bite the bullet and choose two plants to keep and cut the rest at the base. That might give the most chance for the two remaining ones to thrive and produce big fruits.