Roasted Benning's Green Tint

After all my struggles with caterpillars and eggs, the Benning's Green Tint plants are producing well. David wasn't sure how to use these squash since he's never cooked with pattypans before. Our first dinner used the squash on a pizza. It was delicious, but the squash was one of many toppings, making it hard to attribute the excellent flavor just to the squash.

Last night, David decided to keep it simple and roast the squash. This couldn't be easier, and uses only a few ingredients that everyone has in the kitchen. Preheat the oven to 425, and slice the squash fairly thin. Toss in olive oil, sea salt and black pepper. Roast in the oven until cooked and golden brown. The squash shrinks a lot in the oven, so I suggest two squash per person as a side dish. The roasted squash is amazing -- it has a surprising sweetness and richness of flavor. David and I concur that Benning's Green Tint is now one of our favorite vegetables. Picking off all those squash vine borer eggs is definitely worth it.

Oddities in the garden

I spend a lot of time studying my Benning's Green Tint squash plants while I look for squash vine borer eggs, rogue caterpillars, and female flowers that need to be fertilized. My familiarity with these plants makes any aberration readily apparent, and this morning an odd-looking flower on one of my plants stood out. It looked like the stamen had split into two. I suspected some type of insect problem, but closer inspection revealed that the flower center had two of everything, mirror images of one another. Could it be a confused flower that was both male and female? It would make for efficient fertilizing. I looked under the flower and saw it was 100% male with no baby squash below. Very odd.

Internet research led to the answer. We have twins! According to cyber experts, twin flowers occur on squash plants with some regularity. Female blossoms can also be twins, leading to a conjoined double squash that looks odd but is perfectly edible. I had no idea twins occurred in the vegetable world, and find this parallel with the animal kingdom fascinating.

I love making these odd discoveries in the garden. A cayenne pepper that is impossibly contorted and twisted. A tomato that is yellow, green and red all the same time. Flowers that open in the morning only to close soon after. Every morning I take a walk around the garden to see what's new and interesting. No one in the family shares my excitement about these admittedly minor discoveries. Perhaps too many action-adventure movies have numbed them to the drama taking place right under their noses.

True to gender stereotypes, our boys are hunter-gatherers more focused on the the harvest than the process when it comes to the garden. There's not much interest in planting the seeds, but they are eager to cut the vegetables off the plant. Two mundane gardening activity have captured their fancy. The first is weeding -- there's something so satisfying to them about killing all our evil invaders. Their favorite activity, though, is watering the garden. The boys fight over the hose, and would happily spend hours soaking the yard. Several plants have gone to their death thanks to the "power wash" setting on the hose (now strictly banned), and the kids get much wetter than the plants. But any help is welcome, especially since it gives me more time to study and learn in our garden.

Single yellow female seeks partner

According to the census bureau, Alaska has 114 single men for every 100 unmarried women, the highest ratio of men to women among all states. That makes the odds good for a single woman in Alaska, but a female squash blossom has an even better chance of finding a partner. Yesterday was typical, with 20 male flower blossoms on my squash plants, and only one female. The first flowers to appear on my plants were all male, and it was weeks before the first female appeared. Those early male flowers shriveled and died without their reproductive imperative fulfilled.

As a vegetable gardener, I have mixed feelings about all those male flowers. While their bright yellow blossoms are attractive, they are merely ornamental -- only female flowers can produce a squash -- and our goal is the harvest. It is easy to tell the difference between the male and female flowers -- they have different centers clearly visible when the flowers are open (the female is on the left), and the females have a tiny squash starting on the stem just under the flower. If the female flower isn't fertilized, this squash never develops and the flower drops off. I saw this happen several times on my Benning's Green Tint plants, and I felt like a huge opportunity had been missed.

I may sound a bit obsessed by my battle against the Squash Vine Borer, but I know that eventually I will be miss an egg, and a voracious caterpillar will soon after send my plant to the compost heap. So when I am lucky enough to have a female flower, I no longer leave anything to chance. I cut off a male flower, remove the petals, and hand-pollinate the female. There are always plenty of male flowers available, making it easy to sacrifice one. And this form of artificial insemination should guaranty a baby squash in the future. I hand-pollinate in the morning when the flowers are open and loaded with pollen.

There are never many female flowers to pollinate, so there are always many extra male flowers. I've always left them on the plant to close and wither after a day or two. Yesterday, I decided to remove them for David to use in the kitchen. In restaurants, squash blossoms are quite a delicacy. This is due in large part to the ephemeral nature of these blossoms. They're good for about a day once cut from the plant, making for tough logistics in the restaurant business. Of course, we just have to transport ours from the yard to the kitchen, but we still had to cook them quickly.

David used a Mario Batali recipe for fried squash blossoms. Batali's instructions are useful: step one, check for insects. This was not a bad idea since I always spy ants crawling all over the centers of the blossoms. And when I was carrying the blossoms, a bee kept flying into the centers trying to harvest the pollen before I disappeared into the house. None of the ants seemed to have survived the day in our refrigerator and the bee stayed outside, so David was able to quickly stuff the blossoms with a ricotta filling and fry them in oil. The blossoms were dressed with a yellow tomato oil made with our yellow pear tomatoes, and the combination was sublime.

The food disappeared quickly, leaving me wanting more. This morning I was not surprised to find 18 new male flowers on our Benning's Green Tint plants. Unfortunately, there were no females to be found, so I removed every flower and quickly stashed them in the refrigerator. I can't wait for another helping of fried squash blossoms for dinner; those abundant male flowers won't be wasted any longer. Squash blossoms makes the wait for an actual squash harvest almost tolerable.

Victory thy name is Benning's Green Tint

Finally, we have a squash that has survived my enemy the Squash Vine Borer. This is cause for celebration after every other zucchini and squash plant in our garden has gone to its death without producing a single offspring. I have watched this "Benning's Green Tint" squash develop each day, and finally decided not to tempt fate any longer. When I cut if off the plant, I was excited to see two small squash developing on the same plant, promising at least one more harvest. Unfortunately, I also removed at least 30 squash vine borer eggs glowing in dark red all over the leaves and stems of the plant, so although I have won this small victory, my nemesis has obviously not given up her efforts.

Benning's Green Tint is a patty-pan squash, which is a flattish shape reminiscent of a flying saucer. In color, my squash is more white than green. I'm not sure if this means I waited too long to remove it, but the squash isn't larger than the palm of my hand. Now I have the problem I seem to always face at the beginning of a harvest. What do you do with a single vegetable? This was particularly a problem when the snap beans started. You can't do much with 1 green bean, or even 3 or 4, but I didn't want to leave them on the plant lest they slow down the plant's production of additional beans. I put those first beans in the refrigerator, hoping to have more in time to cook them all together.

The squash isn't quite as small, and should make at least one dinner. I'll have to consult with him to decide what we can produce with our small harvest, but I'm guessing a new pizza creation is in order.

Last night, we made a tasty pizza with arugula and yellow pear tomatoes from the garden, plus cream cheese instead of sauce. The idea was inspired by a pizza described in this month's New York Magazine. When it was time to cut the arugula, there was a serious rain storm outside. The satellite went out, our giant timber bamboo was bending onto the roof, and our driveway turned into a river. Nevertheless, David braved the rain to go retrieve the arugula. As soon as he walked back in, the fragrance from the arugula was overwhelming.

This is the first time we've eaten arugula fresh from the garden. There was so much more flavor than what I've tasted before -- not just the customary bitterness, but also a tartness similar to fresh spinach, with a dense texture. The yellow pear tomatoes turned sweet and juicy in the oven, combining perfectly with the arugula, and the tangy cream cheese pulled all the flavors together. With very few ingredients, this pizza may be my favorite yet. It will be hard to top, but I know I'll enjoy anything that includes our Benning's squash. With each bite, I'll savor my victory over the squash vine borers.

Battling the squash vine borers

Before Hurricane Ike, our garden was a butterfly habitat. We had host plants for butterflies to lay their eggs, and nectar plants to feed them. For years, I brought caterpillars of all types into the house to watch their amazing growth and metamorphosis, much to the delight of our sons and David's disgust. Only a few escaped, but David still hasn't forgiven me.

Ike knocked down our fences, a few trees and our carport. Large parts of the garden were wiped out. Some plants returned, but the weeds quickly gained the upper hand. We finally gave up trying to restore the old garden, and decided to clear out everything to start a new garden devoted to vegetables. We still have lots of host plants. To name just a few, we have milkweed for the monarchs, bronze fennel for the black swallowtails, a lime tree for the giant swallowtails, passionflower vine for the gulf fritilaries, and a hackberry tree (missing it's top thanks to Ike) for a slew of butterflies including the question mark and hackberry emperor. And that's just the short list.

The intention is for the vegetables and butterflies to happily co-exist. Butterfly caterpillars for the most part limit themselves to eating plant foliage, rarely inflicting anything more than cosmetic damage to the plant. However, the vegetable garden has forced me to expand my expertise beyond butterflies to include at least one moth: the squash vine borer.

Never have I so hated an insect. Before I knew what had happened, all our zucchini and squash plants suddenly flopped over. The huge, beautiful green leaves started to yellow and die. And the abundant flowers produced not a single zucchini or squash. I mourned the loss of my Cocozelle, Costata Romanesca and Lungo Bianco zucchinis, and researched extensively to discover the cause of their death.

At first I suspected a disease, but soon learned that the culprit was the squash vine borer. Unlike my beloved butterfly caterpillars which limit themselves to eating leaves, the squash vine borer caterpillar hides inside the stem of its host, making it invisible to the gardener. And as it eats and grows inside the stem, it eventually weakens and kills its host.

I read that some growers cut open the stem and remove the caterpillars. I attempted this, and actually found two caterpillars. They were fat and happy inside the stems of my zucchini. Unfortunately, I'm not known for my knife skills, and while I killed the caterpillars I also caused catastrophic harm to my already weakened plants. I felt like Bill Murray in Caddyshack trying to defeat the mole destroying his golf course -- the caterpillars may be gone, but so are my plants.

I don't have any more zucchini plants right now, but I do have several Benning's Green Tint squash plants started from Southern Exposure seeds. I have developed an improved technique for killing the caterpillars. I use a cake tester to stab through the stem anywhere I detect a hint of caterpillar frass. The picture shows the holes I've made in the stem of one plant. The big split is where the caterpillar was living inside the stem. Amazingly, the plant is still quite healthy and flowering profusely. Don't worry, I don't use the cake tester for baking.

I now spend each morning and evening searching for eggs, and handpicking them off the stems, leaves and even flowers of my plants. I have caught the moth lurking in my garden several times, but so far I haven't been fast enough to catch her. All this effort makes me wonder how much I really like zucchini and squash. Is it worth the effort? If I ever manage to successfully harvest a zucchini or squash, I'll let you know.