staple
Winter squash
Waltham butternut, Hubbard, and candy-roaster keep until March on a shelf.
Vitamin A, calories, and no jar required if you have a cool room.
- When to sow
- Hills after May 15, or start indoors May 1. Two plants per hill, thin to the best.
- Spacing
- Hills 4–6 ft apart. Give them a compost trench — they are hogs.
- Days
- 90–110
- Harvest
- Rinds hard, ground-spot orange or cream, stem corky. Cut with 2 in of stem. Never carry by the stem.
- Store
- Cure 10 days at 80°F if you can (a sunny porch). Then 50–55°F, dry. Butternut lasts longest. Acorn is a short keeper.
- Save seed
- Squash cross. Bag female flowers and hand-pollinate in the morning, or grow one type.
- Companions
- Corn, beans, nasturtium. Keep cucumbers and melons away if you are seed-saving.
- Pests
- Squash vine borer — wrap stem bases with foil, watch for frass, slit and kill the grub, bury the wounded stem so it reroots. Squash bug eggs on leaf undersides — crush weekly.
- One healthy butternut vine can give 8–15 fruits. That is a lot of winter soup.