In many countries, squashes and pumpkins are grown as much for the edible tips of their vines as for their fruit. 

Over here, in recent years, we’ve got used to the idea of eating courgette flowers, but few people make use of the leaves and stems. 

Since the plants of this family take up a lot of room for several months, it seems daft not to get all the food we can out of them.

Once your pumpkins, courgettes, winter squashes and summer squashes are well established in July or August, and fruits have started to form on them, you can harvest the growing tips without doing the plants any damage.

What you’re after are the last few inches of the pumpkin’s long, trailing stems, which by midsummer are creeping or clambering all over the veg patch. Further up the vine, back towards the plant’s centre, the stems are tough and spiky, but at the point of growth they, along with the tendrils, smaller leaves, flowers and nascent fruits, are perfectly tender.

Some people peel them before use, others scrape off the prickles, while some don’t bother doing either. 

You’ll have to establish your choice through trial and error. As well as personal taste, the relative tenderness of the crop will be determined by which variety you’re growing, what the weather’s been like and what kind of soil you have. The same factors will decide just how many inches constitute “the last few.”

Pumpkin shoots make a surprisingly substantial, and very tasty, green vegetable, simply steamed for a few minutes. 

In various cuisines around the world they are also fried with oil and garlic, used in spicy stir-fries, stewed in curries and other sauces or cooked in batter. There are lots of recipes on the internet for the Thai way of cooking them, simmered in coconut milk.

Keep your plants productive, of both shoots and fruits, by never letting them suffer dryness around the roots. Give them a plentiful watering at their bases once a week.

I did offer Fighting Fund supremo Ivan Beavis a barrow load of pumpkin tips as this column’s contribution to the paper’s Summer of Heroes fundraising appeal, but he didn’t seem all that impressed. 

So instead, I’ve put together an ebook called The Plot So Far, which collects about 100 of my Morning Star gardening columns from the last couple of decades.

All proceeds from sales of the ebook will go to the Fighting Fund. It costs $3.99 (a bit over two quid), and is available in all the usual ereader formats. 

You can buy it right now, directly from www.smash
words.com/books/view/462129. Over the next week or so it will also become downloadable from most other major ebook retailers.

I think you ought to buy a copy, if only to congratulate me for avoiding the temptation to call the book For Peas and Socialism.