I have a strange but positive issue with the cucubrita family. This family includes pumpkins, squash, zucchini, cucumbers etc.

You see, I grow a lot of them, cook and eat them, and also pressure can and preserve those that I cannot eat in time. In the process, I cut and clean them before cooking or canning. I separate the seeds and preserve them. But, a few seeds escape the separation, or are knowingly discarded because they appear thin or somehow unappealing. So, all these left over seeds end up with the pulp and often into my vermicompost bin. A few times, it gets recycled by going out from the bin on to my garden beds. A few times the composted soil containing the bins spill over and land outside of vegetable beds.

What is interesting, is that much of these seeds remain alive and viable. So, at the right time in the season, they suddenly sprout, in unexpected places. How unexpected? Well, they crop up on the ground in my backyard, or in corners of vegetable beds designed for other plants such as tomatoes. They even sprout inside my vermicompost bin.

Since they produce food – dense and nutritious food, and I like them, I do not like to kill these suddenly appeared sprouts. Given a chance I transplant them to a proper bed, or try to let them grow right on the ground, if it is not in my walk path.

Now, the thing is, all these cucubrita plants looks somewhat similar when they first sprout. Their primary leaves that point down while pushing through the soil by their “shoulder”, usually yellow in colour, looks nearly indistinguishable, except perhaps in their size. For example, a cucumber seed is similar shaped but smaller, so the original sprouted leaves are also smaller. So, I usually do not know what kind of plant this will be, within the family. But by the time secondary leaves come out and starts growing, the distinctions appears. Each of these leaves have their own unique pattern. I can more or less identify proper pumpkins, although there are way too many varieties within pumpkins themselves. Then there are the squash varieties, a huge diversified group. Then there are gourds, cucumbers etc.

Sometimes I just don’t know and cannot guess that kind of a cucubrita this one will be, partly because we also get hybrids that did not exist in my garden before and I am not particularly aware of the types.