With an eye towards potential food supply problems, I have decided to work more on growing winter squash this year. Winter squash store easily with minimal work and are nutrient rich. At my day job I usually grow a bunch, mostly for decorating in the fall. I am looking at home growing and eating. For this I prefer bush types and early ripening to get maximum yield from my garden area. Smaller fruit size might also be good to reduce food waste. Those massive Hubbards are awesome, but that would be hard to use up once cut.
I am growing:
-Burpee’s Butterbush (bush/small vining butternut)
-Table Queen Bush (bush acorn)
-Gold Nugget (bush red kuri type. Originally bred as a sweet potato replacement in short season areas. From Minnesota I think)
Sweet REBA (Resistant Early Bush Acorn, from Cornell of memory serves)
Potimarron (french red kuri type, not as dwarf but sounded good)
This gives me 3 species to save seed from as I determine what works best.
In summer squash I am already impressed with Homs Kousa from Experimental Farm Network. Great flavor and already productive. I am trying Centercut Tromboncino from Dr. Mazourek at Cornell. It is an unruly beast of a plant!
My white whale is Jersey Golden acorn squash. It was being bred as a dual purpose summer and winter squash with exceptionally high nutrient levels, but breeding wasn’t really finished and I can’t seem to find any sources. Makes you wonder how many excellent varieties were lost…
Winter squash is definitely one of my favourite crops to grow and harvest. Here’s what I’ve planted:
Black Futsu
Lower Salmon River
Sonca butternut
I should really try an acorn next year. This is the first year in a while I’ve not grown Bitterroot Buttercup - I normally do. Maybe I still have time to put in a hill.
Summer squashes are still growing on me. I find them harder to use up. The one we do eat a lot of is spaghetti squash, but for whatever reason I haven’t gotten in the habit of growing it.
I’m trying this cultivar this year, but the seedlings have hardly grown even in the greenhouse in this cold spring, maybe they want more warmth or different pH, the rainwater I use is pretty acidic I guess:
I’m also growing Cherokee tan pumpkins from @JeremiahT, but those are getting powdery mildew and lots of slug damage, and also seem pale despite feeding them with fish emulsion.
For summer squash, I’ve got a single green zucchini just to try it out, but otherwise nothing. Would be interested in hearing any suggestions for PNW summer squash for next year.
I have always enjoyed butternut and zucchini squash. They are all easy to grow and grow well in my area. 3 dollars with taxes will get me 8 plants from seed when buying at big box stores. Butternut squash tastes great with cinnamon brown sugar and raisins Zucchini is great for zucchini bread because it absorbs all the sugars. It was introduced to me as a kid because it was so easy to grow and is still a staple in my fall diet.
I’ve got delicata, kubocha and blue hubbard out. I also do patty pan and yellow crookneck every year because they produce fast. I only got one Hubbard last year, I hope this year is better for them. the plants are still fairly small, about maybe 6 inches along.
I’m sure yellow leaves are because of the cold!
I put squash and cuke transplants under plastic cloches for the first week. But tricky…got to get the cloches off by 10am and back on by 4pm …or plants get fried. When working I cooked many transplants!
I received a free packet of Woodrey’s from Sandhill a couple of years ago. I am just getting around to trying them this year. So far there is strong growth. We’ll see how it responds to squash bugs and squash vine borers.
Squash don’t do well with transplant and most places can be direct sown. That is why I always plant squash directly where I want to grow them. Every time someone has a squash plant and has problems with it they always seemed to have transplanted it.
I’ve never had trouble transplanting them, though I’ve heard that same conventional wisdom. The problem with direct sowing in western WA is the soil isn’t warm enough to germinate squash here until (maybe) late summer, so they basically never sprout unless you start them in a greenhouse or indoors. Maybe a cloche would work, though.
I start them in larger 6" pots rather than trays, so they are less likely to get rootbound or have their roots damaged when transplanting. In this case they looked just as sad before they were transplanted, and I just was planting them out to make room on the heating tray for the next batch of seedlings, which will hopefully do better now that it’s warming up more.
Here we can’t sow until May and my season ends mid to late October most years. I thought that was bad but I have found shorter seasons up higher north. Easy to forget that I suppose. Most years I plant squash I plant from seed around late May or even June and get fruit in August.
I always soak my squash seed for 6-8 hours, then germinate them in the moist paper towels in a ziplock bag just to make sure they are viable and get started if the soil is cool. I plant them when I see a little root about a quarter-inch or so. They’re usually up in 4-5 days at that point.
This year I’m growing:
Summer - Yellow crook neck, Fordhook (green zukes, big plant) and Striato of Naples.
Winter - Butterscotch (a small butternut that has short vines, sort of a bush), Mrs. Amerson’s winter squash (Muschata), and Tromboncino (which I’ll eat as summer squash mostly once the squash vine borers take out the C. pepo plants)
The butterscotch is really delicious and I love the size to just roast and share with one other person. The small vines are great as well. The only downsides are that they don’t keep as long as some of the larger varieties and they are a hybrid so I can’t keep seeds and expect them to be true.
I’ve also grown Tahitian Melon (huge crook necked butternuts) which were really good, but very big so you need to figure out what you’re doing with all of it at once. I grew South Anna butternut a few years ago as well, which is butternut and Seminole hybrid and it was nice that it is pretty much downy mildew resistant, but the taste wasn’t as good as other butternuts.
