A Gardeners Forum Forums General Discussion The Food Garden Forum Help- I can't tell the difference between these two...

Hello all. Before you start laughing, yes, I'm a newbie.

In short, this year I decided it would be fun to start my garden from seeds inside. Everything was going great. Plants are all ready to start going out. The problem is that my young daugther thought it would be fun to remove some of the id stakes out of the peat pots. Now I have several dozen four inch plants that to my untrained eye all look the same.

Is there any way to tell a zucchini, yellow squash and pumpkin apart at this stage? The leaves all look the same. I've been able to tell the watermelon apart because one stake was left in and those leaves don't look the same as any of the others.

Second question. If I'm unable to tell the difference, what happens if I plant a squash near a pumpkin?

Ugh. PLEASE HELP!
thanks

Nothing will happen if you plant one beside the other .

Leaves will be tricky.. but later zucchini grows like a bush type .. The others dont.

thanks. the last thing I want is orange zuchinni and green pumpkins. that would just be weird. :-)

LOL

Naw it wont happen .

Unless you pick the seeds this fall an use them, things will cross, but not this year..

Your safe no matter how you plant them.. We plant zucchini yearly..Love it fried with flower.

try breading and flouring the 'flowers" as well. Pick them in early morning.

You gotta be kidding.. Eatin flowers...

I will stick to the fruit .

too funny about your daughter pulling out the tags. it sounds like something that would happen to me. 'why'd you do that'? 'I don't know'? ha ha

yea, just plant them anywhere. they needs lots of room though! especially the watermellon. I put my 'squash like' plants 18" apart this year to save room. they are just now really taking off and I wish I had gone with at least 2 foot instead.

and no, they won't cross pollinate this year at all. I wouldn't save the seeds though. I wanna say they won't cross at ALL. the only time you run into bad cross polination (through natural means-bees and such) is if you have two different varieties of the same plant. two varieties of yellow squash, or two different var. of watermelon ect. I'm not 100% certain on that, but read something that lead me to believe that a few weeks back.