The marrow today – just shy of half a metre in length.

We’ve all been watching the marrow plant in awe for the past two weeks. The fruit that has been growing has been doing so at an amazing rate…

…so amazing that I’ve been measuring and photographing the evidence almost daily.

Take this, for example – it grew 5cm in length over a 24 hour period! My anticipation of that continued rate of growth was disappointed over the last few days, but then I noticed that it had been growing in girth…

10cm today, at the widest part of the fruit

Unfortunately, that girth is only happening at the base of the fruit…

In profile a couple of days ago, you can see how the bottom is much wider than the top.

We’re wondering when to harvest the fruit. Does the drying flower at the base of it provide an indication? My mum thinks so, but I’m inclined to leave it a little longer just to see how much bigger it can get.

The new marrow flower bloomed yesterday. Will it set fruit?

In the meantime, though, a new fruit flower has bloomed at the other end of the trellis. We’ll find out in a day or two whether it will grow into a fruit or not – but if it does, I’m going to have to do even more ad-lib trellis-building again…

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