The Mysterious Things My Garden Bears; Or, A Tale of Two Squash

I planted two varieties of squash in the spring - an heirloom zuchinni, and an organic yellow crookneck squash..    I have not been getting what I expected - I've had some small green zuchinni's, some odd monster mutant thing, and nothing that looks like a yellow crookneck squash.  But I had some monster plants (that were bearing odd monster mutant things.)

A couple of days ago, I happened to notice that I had a third thing growing - but the plants were so inter weaved I couldn't tell which plant it was coming from.  So I decided to start cutting things back to figure out what I had.

That's some of the weird stuff.  It looks a bit like acorn squash, but much larger - and I didn't plant acorn squash!    Here's a close-up:

So I started cutting away some of the foliage to get a clear view of what's in that tangle - and what I find is two different things growing from the same plant - even the same stem! 

That is a Costata Romanesco heirloom zuchinni - which is what I planted!  


I cut one of the large acorn squash-like things in half.  It was pretty hard to cut - like an acorn squash would be.  This is what it looks like inside:

I only dug out one of the plants, because the way it had grown, I could not separate what I wanted from what I didn't want.  The really giant plant, which I had expected to dig out - most of it I cut away, but I had a remaining section that seems to be producing the right stuff, so I left it there to see what I keep getting.  For what it's worth, all of the acorn-type things also had a bad case of blossom-end rot.  Some were half rotten.    But here is what I ended up with when I was finished:

We ate one of those zucchinis tonight - VERY good.  Really sweet, not at all bitter.  I hope I keep getting more.  Meanwhile, the yellow crooknecks are completely MIA - those seeds produced very small green zucchini - which are also very good, at least.   But I really like yellow crookneck squash, and so it's disappointing that I don't have any.  

One of the reasons I wanted to get the mutant squash out of my garden is that I didn't want any seeds ending up in my beds.  I didn't even put them in my compost bin, they went into a plastic bag and into the garbage.  I had so many of those big things, I couldn't even lift the bag!