Thanks! I only had some of the other posts about sweet potato harvests to go by, plus a couple of books (and they all said the same thing about waiting until frost!). My intuition told me to not wait until a real freeze, but that river keeps my air temp. too warm for a frost mostly until REALLY cold weather sets in. So, my tubers kept well, do you think the slips from them will make good, sweet tubers this year (if I harvest them much earlier)? They were a dream to grow, so I'm up for trying again. Cheers, Sunni

Thanks Konrad. Now that I have the Golden spice I have a bit more to work with. The John will most likely be a pollinator for the Golden spice. I will see how the John taste when theyre ripe. MY boss says theyre ok. Maybe they need a slightly warmer climate to sweeten up then where you are? Either way, I plan to graft Flemish Beauty to the John, as well as my bosc seedling. Im just not sure if I am going to graft a few branches on the john, or replace the leader at the top. Drew - Thanks! I thought about removing all the fruit, but decided to leave one or two. THe john set so much fruit I decided it was ready to produce, so I left a small crop of 6. The apple only set 6 fruit and ended up with 2, so I let it do its thing. Seeing as I have the golden spice, and its been described as "precocious" then I should get good pollination from the John and vice versa, which should mean better fruit set. That is, if the flower at the same time here....

You need a soil test to be certain what's going on with the ground itself. No amount of guessing will help. Tell them what you're trying to grow and they can offer corrections tailor made for specific crops, usually. Generally, you need softer soil so the tubers will be able to expand. Incorporate all the organic matter you can find. Compost is supreme, but chipped leaves are great, manures are good, and if you absolutely have to, try peat moss. Someone suggested sand to me, but I believe that red clay plus sand = concrete and I don't want it to be worse than it is already. I plant about 300 slips per year. I do the same thing every year. I get varying results and still don't know why. Last year, I had a decent crop, but not any huge tubers like in the past. So this March, I hauled in fresh horse manure and dumped it and tilled it in. When I was ready to plant in May when the slips arrived, that had mostly rotted. I use a turn plow to make hilled rows. It digs deep. I go both ways to make one row so it's uniform on both sides. Works for me. Then I'll go back and hand plant 18 to 24 inches apart and firm the soil around them on top of the ridge. I make a depression around them to help catch water. Otherwise, it runs off, not in. Red clay forms a crust in a heart beat. I'll water a few times as is, then I'll go back and poke holes in the hill 6 or 8 inches deep and water again into the holes so water gets into the hill. Usually I have to water 4 to 6 times, once every other day, before it rains enough and the plants look like they will survive on their own. I may go 3 days between if it's overcast and not so hot. Watering is done by hand. I'm not near a spigot. Used to be 2 gallon cans filled from a rubbermaid container and spritz each plant. Now I have a 300 gallon tank on a trailer and a hose. I still walk the rows, but I can give each plant more water at a time without fear of running out so soon. 300 plants means about 500 row feet. last year, I dumped a quart of fish emulsion, a bottle of NOG, and a small bottle of chelated iron (needed magnesium or manganese, I forget) and just for good measure, a handful of 20 mule team borax for boron. They need boron. I added 200 gallons of water. Nice fragrant cocktail. I watered both the sweets and the tomatoes and pepper transplants with it. I had the best pepper production I've ever had. Sweets, not so much. This year, I added fresh manure in March and watered again with the cocktail. I dug sample sweets early last week that were the size of gallon milk jugs. Literally. I'm waiting to dig the rest another week or two. I usually dig them right at the September/October change. I've had rabbit issues this year from what I can tell looking at the patch. But the vines are thick and heavy, the leaves are huge. I'm looking forward to the big dig in another week or two. Next year, I should be using rain water. That's the plan anyway. See if this works. If not, click the link below. This is from two random plants near the end of the rows. Smaller regular size tubers are in the bucket... Here is a link that might be useful:

Larry, That's quite a list of requirements for a squash to fill, but there's ways to deal with every issue. There are plenty of squash that taste good and have great texture, so that part of it is relatively easy. There really aren't any squash, especially edible winter squash, that grow on little to no water. Dream on! lol Plants have got to have water, especially fruiting plants. Weeds will always be with us. The best way I have found to avoid weed issues with winter squash is to put down black plastic and plant the squash plants through slits cut into the plastic. The only place you'll have issues with weeds growing will be right in the slits in the plastic where the squash plants grow up through the plants and they are easy to pull because you know where the slits are so you know where to watch for weeds. Unfortunately, with black plastic, water runs off the plastic so you have to put soaker hoses or drip irrigation lines down underneath the plastic. That's not too difficult to do. I just put down the irrigation lines first, then the black plastic, then cut slits in the plastic (being careful not to cut through the irrigation lines) and plant the plants through the slits. Insects---these are always going to be with us. I try to encourage a good population of beneficial insects to help control the bad insects. It is not a 100% surefire solution, but is one of the weapons in our arsenal. The only pests on squash that concern me are squash bugs (which I don't even have every year but about every other year) and squash vine borers. With the squash bugs, I hand-pick them and destroy them when I see them, but I really don't see them all that often. If you can find them and destroy them before they begin breeding and get firmly established, that helps a lot. With the squash vine borers, I mostly just make them into a non-issue by growing Cuccurbita moschata types. Unlike most winter squash/pumpkins, the C. moschata types have solid stems the borers cannot easily bore their way through. My favorite moschata is Seminole, but I also like Tahitian Melon, Long Island Cheese, Waltham Butternut, Musquee de Provence, Black Futtsu and Cornfield Pumpkin. To grow any other types of winter squash including the standard Halloween-type pumpkins, I have to raise them under floating row covers from the day I plant them in the ground in order to keep the pests off of them, especially the squash vine borers. That does require hand pollination since the row covers prevent pollinators from reaching the plants. With summer squash, I plant early and also plant new succession plants about once a month. That way, I always have newer plants coming along in case the pests get to the older plants. Animals? Well, every wild critter around has to eat to survive and anything growing in our yards and gardens is fair game as far as the wild things are concerned. All that's worked for me is fencing that exludes them. I started out with a shorter fence that worked moderately well, but occasionally the deer would breach it and eats tons of plants in one night, often eating them down to the ground. Raising the fence tall enough to keep the deer out was a major PITA, but once we had done it, I just didn't have to worry about the animals getting into the garden. The peace of mind, alone, is worth the amount of time, effort and money it took to put up a tall fence. There are quite a few winter squash that easily store for 6 months to a year, and I've had some last up to 2 years in storage. Any winter squash that has a very hard rind tends to store well. My favorite for long-term storage are the C. moshata types, particularly Semninole and any of the cheese pumpkins, but I've also had other types that are not moschatas last a really long time in storage, including Green-striped Cushaw, Black Futtsu and Turk's Turban. I actually find winter squash relatively easy to grow and in my garden they pretty much are a plant-than-and-forget-about-them plants as long as I either cover them with floating row covers (for the ones that are not C. moshata varieties) or grow only moschata types. The C. moschatas don't get any attention from me once they're planted---they may get watered when I am watering the tomatoes because I have them on the same driplines, but I don't go out of my way to give them attention in any other way. When do the C. moshatae squashs get attention? When the winter squash start turning their mature color and need to be harvested. I used to grow lots and lots of types that were not C. moschata, but the SVBs make that so challenging that it is easier to just easier to choose varieties that are C. moschata. I love having piles of pumpkins, squash and gourds all over the place for winter decorations and that is why I used to grow tons of different kinds every year. The squash vine borers have made me cut back on growing the C. pepo, maxima and mixta/agyrosperma types but at least it still is easy to grow moschatas. With regards to Lisa's reoomendation of Blue Hubbard, I love Blue Hubbard and all hubbard types. I grew them every year here in our first few years after we moved here because the squash vine borers had not found our garden yet. Once the squash vine borers found us about 6 or 7 years after we moved here, I reluctantly gave up growing Blue Hubbard, Golden Hubbard and Red Kuri (all of which are C. maxima types) because the borers just destroy them. I cannot afford to waste space on a plant that is guaranteed to be killed by SVBs every year before it can produce a harvest. The best way to grow Blue Hubbard, which is one of the winter squash that research as shown is most susceptible to SVBs, is to site it maybe 20 or 30 feet from your main garden so it can serve as a trap crop that entices the squash vine borers away from your 'real' winter squash crop. You then can use the method of your choice to kill the SVBs when they congregate on/in the Blue Hubbards. Some people who'd never spray a chemical pesticide in their veggie garden will spray them on the Blue Hubbard trap crop in the hope that they'll kill the SVBs on those plants and keep the SVBs from becoming an issue in the rest of the garden. Another way to combat the evil squash vine borers is to plant a row of buckwheat somewhere near your squash. The buckwheat attracts predators that prey upon the borers and help control them. I had success some years just by wrapping the squash stems with fabric that excludes the borers. However, you cannot always wrap every inch of the stem, so I find it easier to use row cover over the whole bed of squash. Lisa, Your parents either had a great way of combatting squash vine borers or those suckers never found your parents' garden because the SVBs just wipe out the hubbard types. I love all the Hubbards, but once the squash vine borers found the garden, I just couldn't grow them anymore, and it is really frustrating. I probably could grow them under row cover, but keeping row covering over plants that grow that rampantly can be hard. I usually save the row cover for summer squash since they are bushlike in habit. Carol, I cannot imagine zuchetta as a winter squash either, but I guess.....different strokes for different folks. I grew it for several years, but it produces far more summer squash than I want to deal with. I'd just as soon plant zukes and yellow straightnecks under row covers. I do like to grow the similar Tahitian Melon as a winter squash, and it is buff-colored--it reminds me a lot of Pennlvania Dutch Crookneck, which looks very similar similar to zuchetta but is buff-colored. The last time I grew zuchetta, it escaped from the garden and climbed 20 or 30' up high into a tree. To someone driving up the road, it looked like we were growing a squash tree because the Seminoles also had climbed that same tree. A neighbor told me he was almost afraid to look up in that tree "to see what's growing now". I asured him we weren't growing aliens or anything...just out of control squash. Dawn