A Year for Squash

On the farm, every year something flourishes and something is a bust. One year we have cauliflower coming out of our ears, and the next you can’t seem to beg, borrow, or steal the plants into producing anything bigger than a quarter. Another year, the raspberries outdo themselves, the next there’s hardly enough to keep the birds happy.

Some years, the harvest is not a surprise. If the apple blooms froze out in the spring, there’s little wonder why the apple crop later was a bust. Yet, sometimes the heavy producers do come as a great surprise.

Last year, determined to grow more winter squash, we planted about twice as many starts in our peat pots we start in the basement, then transition outside as the weather warms. Despite fending off squirrels that were raiding the pots and eating the seeds, we had crates and crates of pots to transplant into the resting pig pens. Rains helped keep everything growing, but autumn came on the early side with a heavy frosted hand, and we picked like maniacs well into darkness to save the crop. Even with twice as many plants, the yield was less than half of the previous year.

This year, we decided to grow even more plants but also spread them out further across different garden and resting pig pen spaces. The less aggressive plants like delicotta and butternut were hived off into their own patch as we noticed they were completely out-competed the previous year. This time, winter held in well into spring, and our transplanting was very late in the growing season. Scraggly, barely-hanging-in-there viny plants were mudded into the soil with a “do the best you can my friends!” blessing.

Then the summer drought set in, and we were madly watering just to keep everything alive. The pathetic plants sat there and sat there, some of them looking like their condition was worsening as the days went by, and then one-by-one they started to green up, perk up, and begin the “I will conquer the world” agenda every squash plant secretly possesses.

Any vines that reached through or over the fence into an active pig pen were duly munched off. Vines crept from the patch past the crabapple tree and all the way to touching the side of the garage. Vines snaked their way across the grass and into the forest, climbing up the branches of trees! They grew taller than us, filling the patches like immensely tall carpeting, even though we had spaced the hills much farther apart.

The frost in late August nipped the top leaves, though the fruits were safe below. This can help the plants change their focus from continuing to grow outward and set new fruits to ripening the fruits they already have. The ensuing degeneration of the top foliage gave us sneak peeks into the brewing crop below—tantalizing glimpses of orange, blue, yellow, and speckled orbs.

Wet weather helped us sneak past the recent full Harvest Moon, which would normally have foretold a freeze heading into October. That cold weather is expected to arrive later this week, but the luck of the situation is that the late start to the growing season has been offset by the extended mild autumn, adding about a month to our usual squash-picking time on our farm.

With all these extra patches growing gangbuster, we decided that a head start on picking before the frosts set in would be much better than trying to madly harvest everything all in one day. Wise decision, it turns out!

We started with the delicotta and butternut patch, which was loaded with delicious jewels. We carefully rubbed off the dried-on leaves from the skins and sorted the fruits by level of ripeness. Damaged or severely unripe squashes were relegated to the pigs, who were more than eager to partake of the goodness they’d been watching grow all year! That is one of the blessings of keeping pigs. If anything grown isn’t fit for people, they are ready to turn it into pork.

Yesterday, Mom attacked the large patch behind the aquaponics greenhouse. Acorn, jester, spaghetti squash, pie pumpkins abounded like an overloaded Easter egg hunt. We came later as reinforcements to carry crates and glean through the last of the pickings. While last year, our entire squash harvest filled one hay wagon, this year just this one patch filled the wagon, and we have two more patches to go!

Despite the late start, the drought, the hail, and all the other adversities this growing season, it truly has been quite the year for squash. Time to get ready to pick the next patch. See you down on the farm sometime.