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10/22/2009: "Squash Harvest 2009"

If you've been following along on the blog, you've heard me write concerning the squash. These were plants that I started in soil blocks off-farm, and then transplanted into the farm garden in early summer. They were irrigated by the same drip irrigation that fed the beans and corn; I used 3' foot plant spacing in rows 6 feet apart. Each transplant got a small pocket of organic fertilizer below the transplant at planting time. The variety that I planted was Hubbard squash; the Territorial seed catalog said that the flesh was sweet and creamy, and they're open-pollinated. I originally had wanted to plant Delicata squash, but Territorial had run out of seed by mid-spring. The photo above shows one specimen as it appeared in August; they got a little larger over the next month before the vines finally succumbed to frost in early October.

By and large, the squash did well. A few plants mysteriously turned yellow and faded; it might have been over-watering, or perhaps over-feeding from the fertilizer. But on the whole the squash patch was untroubled by insect pests and herbivores (unlike the beans and the corn, both of which were predated upon by the local brush bunnies). I did have to battle the bindweed in the squash rows; when the plants were small I could hoe carefully in between rows, but as the squash vines spread out I had to resort to hand weeding. There were a couple of weeding days when I just knelt down and crawled through the squash rows ripping out bindweed from beneath the squash vines, doing it "a mano a weed-o," to coin a phrase. Towards the end the squash was pretty dominant, and I more or less gave up on getting it clean of weeds each week.

Here's how things stood last week when I finally got around to harvesting; note how little green there is in the squash area (foreground) compared to the bean area (background, and to the left). That green is bindweed, and it shows that the squash did seem to have an effect suppressing bindweed to an extent.



The end result was about a hundred pounds of squash, shown here in the garden cart. It was a hot day the day that I went to harvest, probably close to 80 degrees in October, and I'll tell you I was sweating going up the hill from the field to the house!



We've since baked up a couple of the squash, and I can tell you that the Hubbard variety lives up to it's seed packet promises! The flesh is deep orange, and very creamy, with a good touch of sweetness. One of the best squash varieties I've ever tasted. I don't regret not growing the Delicata squash at all.