Winter Squash, Not Quite Cold Turkey

I think I averaged something like 18 winter squash vines the past three years. That's a shitload of winter squash vines, if you think of each one running 20-40 feet long and needing to be spaced three feet from its neighbors. That's a ton of watering, a ton of fertilizing, a ton of picking squash bugs and cucumber beetles, performing surgery on stems to kill the infernal squash vine borer larvae, and a whole lot of late-summer spraying (neem oil) to battle powdery mildew.

Thus two is a major accomplishment in self-control. I even picked easy winter squash, the "Fairy" hybrid of Cucurbita moschata, which is pretty pest resistant (C. moschata, unlike, say, C. maxima, which gives us hubbards and jumbo pink bananas, has solid stems that are less vulnerable to squash vine borers, which like to live inside the stems). We planted them in two spots, clearing out some of the ground-cover pea shoots in the raised beds, and I've already got the trellis nearly set up.