squash

squash is a neat plant,

it may not be ideal from a taste point of view,
but winter squash is wonderful from a survival point of view,
it is easy to grow and can get you huge harvests,
and you don't really need special storage at all, just keep it from freezing,
so you don't need refrigeration or  pressure caners, or harvesting equipment, you can grow lots of it easy to feed your animals, and that is why many settlers used squash so much,
you can take extra and dry it to use later (mainly in soup) if you need to store it more than a year,

by the way, summer squash is picked when very young and meant to be ate very soon (like in the summer when it is growing)
and winter squash is meant to finish growing totally and wait till the stem is totally dry or the plant is dead before harvesting and you can store them to eat in the winter.
but each grows in the summer when there is no frost.


there are 4 families of squash, (this means they usually will not cross)
pepo: they are the acorn, zucchini, other summer squash, and most pumpkins,  
maxima: buttercup, hubbard, and some pumpkins
mixta: cushaw
moschata: this is the butternut family and the one I like as it has the most sugars (food value) and stores the best, and some people use butternuts as a summer squash and claim it is better than zucchini, I will have to test that this year.


when I looked up how much to expect from each plant I got numbers form 5 pounds to 500 pounds,
so might be hard to tell what you are going to get if you don't know any more than that,
so use the tricks you can to give the plant the best conditions and you will get the higher end of the scale

squash will send down roots 8 foot deep, so if there is good soil there (or at lest broken up) it will help them,
when I found this out I was not about to dig down 8 foot and mix rotting leaves and wood chips into the soil,
but now that I see that the plants that were only dug up one foot deep (with my tiller), and the ones that were dug up 4 foot deep (with the tractor), I see that the plant is about 3 times bigger already,
so there is the real possibility that digging down 2 foot for one spot may out produce 2 spots only 1 foot deep, so far it appears to be worth the effort to go deeper (or build up soil on top)
so next year I will be digging as far as I can (doubt I will get to 8 foot even with a tractor)

most plants I put in the bottom of a row,
but the squash likes the depth of soil so much that I put it on a mound in the center of a bowl to hold water
can you see it in this picture ? the birds ate this one to the ground before they could get started

and here is another one that has just not grown that much, maybe you can see it better here, but maybe not

anyway,
for each one of the bowls of squash you want 3 plants growing,
now I hate thinning seedlings (just seems mean)
so I started them all in seed trays first so I could get the good ones and put them in the ideal places,
and what I did not know is that the ones that do not do well pretty much thin themselves out, and it is quite a few of them that do that,  and transplanting them is lots of pointless work,
so if you plant 5 in each spot and keep the best 3 you will win, and if you plant 5 and never thin them it will likely be ok as it is very likely that 2 of them will just not come up or not do anything if they do.

so plant 5 per group and plan on keeping the best 3

the squash hills get put on about 5 foot centers and if you need rows, then put them every foot with row spacing of 5 foot.
that will get you fairly good ground cover, and leave you no place to walk through them.

the natives would often plant a plot of corn and use the squash as a fence around it,
they say that deer and racoons don't like walking through it (and neither do it)
but where I am here anything green will be had by them,
so not sure how my plot of sorghum with the squash out side it will do.

here is a leaf from a waltham butternut

and a leaf form a spaghetti squash (it is a pepo, so it will cross with the zucchini, and I wonder what that would make...)

another butternut family

 I lost track when I planted them and only found them again after they got big enough to tell apart,

now as far as flouring,
any of the vines (squash, cucumbers, ect... (genus Cucurbita if you were wondering)) have male and female flowers separate.
they tend to set the male flowers first and they drop off (it is normal)
then they set the female flowers and you start to get fruit, (male flowers still fall off throughout the season)
you tell them apart because the male flowers have a thin stem to the flower, and the female flowers have a start of a bulb before the flower,
a clean and soft paint brush will let you move the pollen from the male flower to the female ones if you have no bees.

now time to go wonder aimlessly in the mid day sun till I get hot and go have lunch (likely 5 min. or less))