Creeping Charles is what I have 
. In no time at all it seems its encroaching and engulfing my crops the same day. I have a little corner I’ve left it alone all season and it’s waist high. I have to be out there every day pulling for a week if I want it gone for any significant amount of time, so naturally it takes up a significant amount of garden space at all times. On the bright side it’s easier to pull it out by the fist full haha.
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Im away at my Moms in NY, and my hysband is keeping me updated with the garden. He pulled some large zucchini for baking and left some behind for seeds. Looks like cucumbers are everywhere too. The jungle has overtaken the chairs. Its ok when the foilage dies back, there will be marvelous seeds throughout the patch.
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What a fabulous jungle!
It looks like you have them in a greenhouse with the top open for the summer. That’s a clever way to keep it from becoming a total oven during the hot season!
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Yup. Actually the sides roll up. The clear you see is new film and its not dulled or foggy yet from sun scald.
Ohhh, that explains it! I was thinking that I’d seen sides that rolled up, but never tops that roll down. Okay, neato! 
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…the lower sides do roll up and that’s why the bottom looks cloudy, its the mesh layer that allows the wind to pass thru…the clear film on the top is so new that it looks like its not there…ill take a better photo…
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Oh, yeah! I can see it now! Nifty.
That’s a beautiful picture, by the way. 
Thanks, its a hot mess of plants but full of fruits. Looking like a good seed year so far. Tomatillos hiding in there too, eggplant are just atarting to bloom. Squash and tomatoes are taking over. I dont mind searching for fruits, they are protected by leaves.
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I have a pepo I’m watching with great interest this year. It has silvery-green speckled leaves, mostly silvery – very pretty leaves, and bound to be way more UV-resistant than most pepos. I have high hopes for it! 
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The big pepo is all grown up (and named ‘zeus’):
Other pepos in the same row as reference:
This is the next biggest one (one leaf has some remaining surround on it):
Maarten
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Ooh, I love that one you have with the silvery leaves. It looks similar to the one I have with silvery leaves!
I hope your big “Zeus” pepo gives you fruit that is tasty!
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First female flowers on my Orangetti. The plant has delicata candystick pepos around it, so that would be a nice cross, or maybe my Zeus pepo wants to get involved as well:
Maarten
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What are ya’ll using for spacing? I’ve been taught 1-2 sqft per squash but my I wildly overseeded to select for robustness and at least at the seedling stage they do not seem to be bothered at all by being sown super densely.
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I sowed mine about one inch apart, about 200 seeds in a row, and the row is only about four feet wide. I don’t want them to grows into the pathways, so I’m picking up the end of any vine that tries to crawl into a pathway and putting it back into the bed. I already have a carpet of squash plants that are two feet tall and fighting with each other over who gets to have a taste of that delicious sunlight . . . 
Yes, they are very crowded that way. But I don’t mind! I did something fairly similar in 2022, and it worked out great; I wound up with about 20 squash plants that were highly vigorous, drought tolerant, and productive, and another 10 or so that were able to stay alive and eke out a single fruit while in full shade underneath the big ones. The rest selected themselves out, which I’m fine with; I want plants that don’t mind being extremely crowded. I saved seeds from all the fruits that tasted good, which was a lot of them.
I don’t water my plants much (maybe once a week, if that; often it’s more like every week and a half to two weeks), and I don’t get rain in summer, so I like to deep mulch them and crowd them tightly together so that they can shade the soil for each other.
I tried giving them more space in 2023 and 2024, and eh! (Shrugs.) I think the ones I crowded way too tightly together did a lot better. Your climate (and therefore the suitability of this approach to your climate) may vary. 
As a note, in case it’s helpful to know, I have VERY hot, intense, high-UV sunlight, so most plants that supposedly want full sun actually want partial shade in my climate. I think that’s one of the reasons crowding them so tightly together works out well. It also helps keep the soil from growing dry as a bone, because there are all those layers of leaves overlapping on top of it, keeping what little moisture there is still available.
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Wow, that’s impressive! All the pepo squashes I’ve ever grown have started with male flowers. Does Zeus have any male flowers? Now I’m wondering if it may be gynoecious (and perhaps also parthenocarpic!).
Emily,
Sorry for the confusion, with “started with female flowers” I meant “is now producing female flowers” not “it skipped the male flowers and started with the female flowers” (if you look at the picture, you will see the male flowers somewhat hidden on the right of the pic)
FYI, I didn’t realize squashes could be gynoecious or parthenocarpic so I will be looking for that now.
Of all the pepos I have, I have 3 with open (male/female) flowers: Zeus (which comes from the GTS mix), another GTS Mix one and an Orangetti squash. I manually pollinated the females of all 3, I made sure that the Orangetti got Zeus’ male seeds so if vine borers take Zeus out, its decendants will be around in the Orangetti squash, it is vining, so easier to defend against vine borers.
Fun fact: the other GTS mix squash has double flowers and Zeus has a triple flower:
(If I would have known this sooner, I would have named it Poseidon, because the triple flower looks like a Trident)
Maarten
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Ohhh! 
My apologies for misunderstanding what you meant! I didn’t realize that phrase could be interpreted two different ways. (Sheepish laugh.)
Yeah, there are gynoecious parenthocarpic squashes! There’s a hybrid from Burpee called “Sure Thing,” for instance – I haven’t tried it yet, but I keep looking at it and thinking, “That might be fun to try!” I really wouldn’t mind some gynoecious parthenocarpic squashes in my landrace. The other plants would produce more than enough male flowers to pollinate all the fruits during the spring and summer, and it would be nice to still keep getting new fruits for those last few weeks of fall when the pollinators have gone to bed, but the first frost hasn’t come yet. I’ve noticed I usually have to hand-pollinate late in the season if I want any fruit set, so some parthenocarpy might be neat.
Also, that triple flower looks totally awesome! I didn’t know squashes could do that! 
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