Well, that didn't take long! Nothing like 90 F temperatures to get squash seeds up out of the ground; I planted on the 10th, and on the 14th, they were breaking ground, so I had to stop what I was doing elsewhere in the garden and get them covered up with floating row covers to keep off the cucumber beetles and squash bugs. You can see the first seedlings next to the still young cilantro plants in this closeup.
On both beds that represented something of a challenge since both beds still have growing crops in them that I don't want to remove until the squashes really need the space. That effectively doubles the crop per square foot, which I consider one of the more essential -- and more interesting -- of high yield vegetable gardeing. Call it Square Foot, call it French Intensive, call it High Yield, call it Urban or Suburban Agriculture...whatever the term it means permanent beds, close spacing, interplanting, succession planting and season extension.
The bed next to the porch just required that I bend the standard metal hoops to a slightly tighter (and thus higher) radius and be mindful of the adjacent shallots while putting on the cover -- not really any different than I did with the first planting back in April that just succumbed to the squash bugs last week. One hopes that the shallots will do better on the edge than the salad greens with that first planting did!
The other row -- the one planted beneath the bean trellis -- was a bit more involved. In this case I had to rig my row hoops a little differently to fit under the existing trellis. What I decided to do was double over the length of row cover (effectively doubling its thickness) and instead of wire hoops used curved bamboo.
The bamboo I chose was the older pieces that I had used years ago as a pepper trellis and whose "legs" had partially rotted from soil contact. By cutting the legs down from about 36 inches to 18 inches, I ended up with solid structure again, and a good height to fit under the bean trellis.
The only problem with this second system, of course, is that the plants will fill the cover more quickly and it will have to come off. We'll look back at this experiment when we get to that stage.
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