Marcus Lopez, Bryan Brown, and Abby Seaman
On Monday 9/20/21, coincidentally, the same day as the 2021 Harvest Moon, we collected the last round of our squash harvest data. Here are our yield results:
The total mass of squash fruit includes everything marketable and unmarketable. Black plastic mulch with drip irrigation appears to have yielded the most, with cultivated bare soil close behind. Straw mulch yielded less, and our rolled rye treatments resulted in 100% crop failure.
Marketable yield includes only those squash without rot, wounds, or other defects. The subplots which received organic pest management sprays based on IPM thresholds generally produced more marketable yield than untreated subplots.
The percentage marketability was perhaps boosted in the straw mulched treatment by the cleanliness of the fruit, but this was also the first treatment to mature, so it was harvested a few days ahead of the others and had less time to subjected to probing insects and pathogens.
Abby and Marcus weighing a bountiful bucket of beautiful squash and inputting data.
Here’s to growing some fine organic delicata squash!
Cheers!