Summer of Squashes

Every summer, I usually plant a few winter squash.  I really like butternut, they just seem more prolific and hardier than many others.  I get a lot of squash vine borers (grubs that drill into the stems and kill the plant) and squash bugs (beetles that eat the plants and damage fruit) and we don't use chemicals (and not many deal with these bugs anyway) so survivability is pretty important to me.  This year, I planted a variety of butternut, I think it's Burgess or something.  I also planted some Sweet Potato squash, and a few Candy Roasters for the first time, hoping for a few good pumpkins and some butternuts to get us through the winter.  

Well.  We'll have squash through the winter for sure, it's the summer of both prolific and unexpected winter squash.  First, there were 2 volunteer butternut plants in the hoophouse strawberries.  My compost doesn't get hot (still tweaking my process) so I get things like weeds and tomatoes but also squash and melons popping up all over the garden.  These hoophouse butternuts have been impressively prolific, putting out probably several dozen at this point, and many are just huge - easily a foot long!  I had a third volunteer butternut in an outside tomato bed, which has already produced a dozen mature fruits, with 4 more on the way.  The other end of that tomato bed gave me an unknown pumpkin, 4 off the one plant that are all at least a foot across, deeply ribbed and dark green like a huge acorn squash, turning butternut-type creamy tan-orange.  I have no idea what they are, as I have never planted one like it that I remember - maybe a cross?  Another tomato bed is producing a plants-worth (maybe 8 or so) of what appear to be volunteer Jarrahdale from last year, the bluish-green pumpkins you may have seen in catalogs (or real life for that matter) - they are usually featured in a photo since they're so cool-looking!  

Then, of course, I actually planted squash - the Candy Roaster in the outdoor okra is doing okay, there's several fruits on it, one mature, one not far behind and a couple of smaller ones.  These are nice-size pumpkins as well, and (as the name suggests) supposed to be delicious.  The other end of that bed has the only intended butternuts, but they were planted pretty late so there's only a handful of half-grown fruits on the few plants that survived the tomato jungle they were planted in (I should probably not do that again).  

Then there's the Sweet Potato squash - they are happy.  I mean happy.  I planted them in the hoophouse, and they went bonkers.  I've never seen plants that tall, the leaves were easily 3 feet high.  I put them under the corn, but apparently a little too early, and they annihilated most of that corn bed.  On one end I switched to watermelon, and those corn made it, but the rest were swallowed up by the squash jungle.  As I mentioned last week, I've already harvested 2 dozen mature fruits - and these are 18-24 inches this year - and there's at least a dozen, maybe 18 or 20 left, from the same size down to ones "only" a foot long or so.

These are our favorite winter squash, for several reasons.  Firstly, they are so vigorous!  They have at this point pretty well succumbed to the squash bugs, and wilted away, but it takes them most of the summer, and they put on and actually mature their fruit first.  They grow quickly, so even when the squash borers and bugs get going, the plants have already put out many feet of stem, and rooted all along the way, so they continue growing until every section is attacked.  Also, the fruit (in a good year) is just so big, each one is worth multiple butternuts.  They have small seed cavities, so lots of flesh per fruit, and (also important) they are really good to eat.  Maybe not as sweet as a butternut, but pretty close.  Finally, the clincher for us - they store well.  As in, to experiment a couple of years ago, I left several in the basement to see how long they would go, and we ate the second to-last-one at 18 months, and the final one (sacrificed to Research) got a bug hole at about 2 years.  If anyone is interested, I have plenty of seed to share, just let me know.  We got the seed from a patient of Caleb's, who simply called it Sweet Potato Squash, but I've been told by a market customer that she's seen it in a catalog called Aunt (Hilda or Thelma or something)'s Sweet Potato Squash, if you would rather use a professional source.  

While my garden certainly leaves plenty to be desired this year, I cannot complain about the squash!  We should be eating it for months if not years - if only Liam hadn't decided he hates squash... :). Oh, and did I mention we're growing sweet potatoes too?!