Cleaning up the squash

(A duplicate post from Places of the Spirit)

My squash vines, both trombocino and baby butternut, were looking bad with powdery mildew and who knows what else.

The few small squash still developing seem to be afflicted with a late outbreak of squash vine borers.  Really?  This late, I thought?  It's some sort of small larvae -- not sure what else it would be.

But the vines looked awful, so the bulk of them were cleaned up this afternoon, ready to plant a Hail Mary crop of sugar snap peas. It's way too late to plant them, if I really expected to get mature peas (these are Sugar Spring --55 days), but it's all about how long the fall season extends, too  Sugar snap peas in the Carolinas are always dicey - sometime spring is great, sometime fall is great, often neither does much.

But I figure we can eat pea shoots regardless as a nice alternative to all the kale and collards we ate last spring, along with freshly planted lettuce, arugula, spinach, cilantro, etc. for this fall.

And the pole beans and yard-long beans are still going strong, along with the peppers.

These are hard-working beds: four-season in this time of staying through the seasons in the mountains of Western North Carolina.  Here's what they looked like back in mid-May.