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Tatume Squash For Your Survival Garden, by John D.
When most people think of post collapse survival, one of the major topics that first comes to mind is food. The internet is full of articles and forums dedicated to canning, hunting, gathering, and of course, gardening. What I don’t often find, are articles specifically dedicated to a particular item of food to be grown in a garden, explaining perhaps why it would be a beneficial plant to start growing now. For me and my own gardening, I have gone from complete and utter newbie, to successful builder of soil and harvester of many delicious edibles. Through out this period of trial and error, I just selected at random packets of seasonal and organic seeds from the local nursery, and while hoping for the best, I would continually return to the net for tips on how to deal with this pest or that fungus.
Having suffered more failures than successes, and now with several growing seasons under my belt, I have narrowed the field of which species I plant in my various garden beds. One species stands out as a new favorite of mine, and this species will be the focus of this article. It is a summer squash called Tatume.
I live in Austin, Texas and basically have a year round growing season. This past winter was mild, so by mid-March I had summer and winter squash already planted and sprouting in the garden. Like most people, I planted the usual suspects; zucchini, yellow crookneck, acorn, and sugar sweet pumpkins. After a nice early harvest began at the outset of summer, the dreaded squash moth arrived. Leaves began to wilt and turn yellow, and I started spending more and more time on my hands and knees wiping the moth’s small red eggs from plant stems. Worse still, I started finding my self more and more often having to use a razor blade to cut small windows into the squash vines so I could exorcise the chubby, white grubs from within. Of course, my chickens loved the vine borers, but I was growing frustrated with fighting a losing battle. Even carrying a fly swatter and striking down the moths themselves when I could was not enough to prevent my entire planting from finally succumbing to the borers. What had been a great spring where I was pulling large quantities of squash every week, became a depressing summer of empty beds where so much green had once thrived.
In conversation with a fellow gardener, I mentioned my loss, and she clued me in to the Tatume squash. She had recently planted some herself after a similar loss of her own plants. According to what she had read, the vines of the Tatume are thinner and denser than those of most other squash, and make traveling within them more difficult for vine borers. She also had read that Tatume re-rooted themselves from their vines frequently, providing auxiliary points along the plant where nutrients could be drawn from the soil should the central vine be lost to pests.
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