Seasonal Garden Vegetables provide plenty of Food and Fun (Winter Squash)

Delicious out-of‑season eating without canning, freezing, or even a root cellar.

Our Thanksgiving meal is not complete without a serving of home-grown winter squash. We store Blue Hubbard, Gold Nuggets, Butternut, Acorn, and Buttercup in the root cellar. For Thanksgiving, we choose our favorite, Blue Hubbard. I have yet to taste as flavorful a squash.

Winter squash is getting more popular with gardeners. Perhaps it’s because they require very little work, yield well, and keep for months in a cool place. You don’t even need a root cellar.

If you have a small garden, try the Gold Nugget. This winter squash takes up as much space as a zucchini plant and yields a bundle of small, delicious squash. We cut them in half and bake them— they’re wonderful.

The Spaghetti squash keeps very well. It has tender, stringy flesh when baked, with a texture surprisingly like spaghetti. Some people like it so much that they serve it with their favorite spaghetti sauce.

I plant winter squash in rows about 10 feet apart after the frost danger is past. Between the rows, I plant a swath of inexpensive dry beans 4 or 5 feet wide. I weed around the squash once or twice and never work the beans at all. They sprout up and start shading out weeds right away.

The nice thing about this system is that I cover the soil quickly with plants, and both crops are ready to harvest at the same time.

Let squash grow as long as you can. The longer they grow and mature, the less water they will contain. That’s important for long keeping. Winter squash which haven’t matured will be a little watery when you cook them up—but still good.

Curing squash for longest keeping

I wait until the vines die or just before the first fall frost to harvest winter squash. They should not be exposed to frost because it will soften their skins and they won’t keep as well. Fully mature squash are the ones with the tough skins. Check by sticking your thumbnail into them. If you break the skin easily, it hasn’t matured and will keep only for a short time.

Harvest your crop on a sunny day, after a few days of dry weather. Cut them off the vines, leaving 2 or 3 inches of stem. If the stem breaks off, set the squash aside. It won’t keep well and should be used first.

Roll the squash over and leave them outside overnight if there’s no danger of frost. Pick them up the next afternoon—the dirt clinging to them should be dry and drop off easily.

Be careful not to bruise the squash you want to store—they won’t keep well.

Never carry them by the stems. (That goes for pumpkins, too.) And never wash them until you are ready to cook them.

Winter squash should be cured in order to dry and harden their shells before being stored.

Ideally, they should be aired in a warm, well-ventilated place for 1 to 2 weeks. It’s usually too cool to achieve the perfect temperature outdoors, but you can group them near your furnace, wood stove, or on a sunny back porch.

I cure my winter squash in the root cellar, running a small, portable fan on them around the clock for a week or so. Even though my root cellar is cool, the circulating air from the fan does the curing.

Then I pile the vegetables two or three deep on shelves located halfway between the floor and ceiling of my root cellar. It’s warmer there than near the floor where I keep my potatoes, and the squash like higher temperatures.

My root cellar is fairly dry, but most cellars are too damp for storing vine crops. They keep best in a cool place (50° to 55° F.) with low humidity.

In the past, folks stashed their winter squash and pumpkins under their beds, but beds were high off the floor and bedrooms unheated in those days. Any cool, dry, dark spot is fine—a spare room, closet floor, attic floor, or even a large cool kitchen cupboard.

Check them regularly. Remove any that are getting soft or look as if they’re starting to rot. Some will keep better than others.

If some squash have started to soften, cook them without butter or seasonings, and freeze them in containers.

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