Jamie’s Little Allotment: Gayton-based gardener on benefits of squash pruning

In his weekly column, Gayton-based gardener Jamie Marsh discusses the benefits of squash pruning…

July should be the perfect growing month, long hot sunny days, which stretch out late into the warm evenings, but it really has been quite the opposite.

I’m now sitting here writing this looking out of the window at a dull cloudy sky, the air is full of drizzle and it’s 15 degrees.

Not what we expect the middle of the summer to be.

The allotment has really reflected the poor summer weather, looking back at photos from this time last year I think the plot is about three weeks behind.

The sun-loving veggies, tomatoes, cucumber, peppers and aubergines are really not loving this cool damp summer, but on the flip side, things like lettuce, salad leaves and radish are romping away.

The majority of lettuce don’t like it too hot with full sunshine and usually bolt, but not so much at the moment, which is a huge plus.

Something else which is starting to take off is my summer squash and courgettes,

I grow mine up and over my aptly named squash tunnel, the main reason being that squash, pumpkins and courgettes take up a massive area on the ground, this is very valuable space which could be used for growing other things.

So training them up and over makes perfect sense, also it makes a great focal point in the allotment.

Even when you’re growing them vertically they still get absolutely ginormous.

Up until last year, I just let them grow and have free rein, but after reading an article on Gardenary by Nicole Burke about the advantages of pruning squash and pumpkins, I have changed that.

It said that pruning the leaves is an easy way to encourage a fruiting plant to produce more of the good stuff.

When you remove extra foliage, you free up some of the plant’s energy to put towards producing more flowers and fruit.

You’re also telling the plant to direct its resources like water and nutrients to the remaining parts.

Nicole Burke, who wrote the article, ran a little experiment in their garden between four squash plants.

The plant that they pruned the least had the least amount of squash blossoms and little fruits forming. It was only supporting about five little squashes when the most heavily pruned plant had ten fruits in production.

So basically at the end of the day, it’s simple: if you take off more leaves, you get more fruit.

I tried this last year and I had great results so I will be trimming the leaves again this year.

I’ve added an extract from the article explaining how to prune squash plants:

“You’ll begin pruning your squash plants as soon as you see the first flowers form.

Once a week, head outside with a clean pair of needle-nose pruners. (It’s a good idea to regularly rub your garden tools down with some rubbing alcohol to prevent spreading disease from one plant to another.)

Start at the base of each plant and work your way up, looking for non-flowering stems. It should be pretty easy to tell which stems are just forming leaves and which ones are forming squash blossoms. The ones that will only form leaves are thicker cylinders with large leaves at the end. These cylinders are actually hollow.”

The flowering stems, in contrast, will be much thinner and won’t extend very far from the interior of the plant. They’ll end in a bloom that may have a little bulge right behind it if it’s a female flower that will turn into fruit.

Your goal is to remove two or three non-flowering stems each week.

Prune each stem very carefully and as close to the main stem as possible. Like I said, the stems of your squash plant are hollow, so you don’t want to leave a lot of stems behind—that would only promote pests and disease. Keep the rest of the stems so they can keep on growing.

I tried to prune my plants word for word but didn’t quite manage it, so if you trim off something you don’t think you should of, it really won’t harm the plant. They are very vigorous and will soon re-grow.

If you try this method please let me know how you get on

Email me at jamieslittleallotment@gmail.com