Squash surprises

Squash surprises

One of the many side benefits of growing garlic is the fact that it is planted in late fall, usually after the first frost. It is one of the first plants to sprout, after the snow has melted, and comes into full bloom well before the tomatoes, squash, corn, beans, eggplant, and other wonders of the summer harvest even begin flowering. To capture the strongest, most savory essence, one should harvest garlic when its green stalks begin to turn brown. In northeast New York, this usually occurs in the second or third week of July. The side benefit is that once the garlic is harvested, you have an empty space full of rich soil in your garden to initiate another round of crops.

We began fantasizing about what we would do with our former garlic field as we began harvesting the bulbs in mid-July. After some discussion, we settled on a fairly basic plan of planting kale, collards, Swiss chard, salad greens, bok choy, green beans, carrots, beets, radishes, and turnips -- basically any fast-growing plant that could begin to mature before the end of September and withstand at least a light frost. Squash -- which requires at least 90 to 100 days to mature -- was not on our minds, until we pulled down a basket of seeds and discovered a plethora of unopened packages of squash.

I began laughing as my husband Jim burrowed his head in his heads and groaned. All summer, our squash has been surprising us with its mysterious shapes, unusual hues, and surprisingly crisp combinations of flavors. In the meantime, we have been wondering: what happened to the butternut, the delicata, the sweet delicata dumplings that we like so much? Did the seeds never sprout? Did they fail to grow?

I would like to blame some of the fiasco on Jim's complete disdain for good, orderly direction. Although he tries to label starter pots as he plants seeds and although I try to keep track of what seeds he plants on what days in my calendar, once the seeds go from starter pot to the ground, Jim forgets what they are. This isn't usually a problem unless you're hoping to grow more than one variety of a particular crop such as peppers, tomatoes, beans, or squash. And even with peppers, tomatoes and beans -- it's pretty easy to tell which variety a plant is producing, once the fruits form. There's a big difference, for instance, in the shape and taste of a poblano over a serrano, or a mild sweet banana pepper versus a hot habanero.

Squash, for us at least, is a different story. As two people who lived in much warmer climates most of our adult lives, we tended to think of squash as being either a zucchini or a pumpkin, with the latter being more suitable for Halloween carving than eating. Moving to New York and seeing the elaborate displays of winter squash that would overflow farmers market stalls from September through January coupled with our own readings on the nutritional benefits and storage quality of these fruits made us fans of the item for life, and over time we have been trying our hand at growing more and more of it. The many, many varieties of squash that exist, however, still bewilder us.

It helps to understand a little about how squash grows. Despite some claims on gardening web sites that squash is a difficult plant to grow, we have not had trouble with it. A member of the solanaceous family of vegetables, squash seeds usually need a fair amount of warmth to sprout. Most gardeners sow the seeds directly into soil around the first of June, or start planting the seeds in starter pots for later transplanting in mid-May. Varieties known as summer squash -- zucchini, yellow crookneck, and patty pan, among others -- will begin to flower fairly quickly and will produce fruit usually by early July. These squash varieties are extremely prolific, as tales of gardens and CSA boxes overflowing with zucchini illustrate.

The other kind of squash variety, however, is a slower grower, and more interesting for an array of reasons. These varieties -- known as winter squash -- include pumpkins, acorn squashes, big gourds, and football-shaped ovals among other varieties. They come in vivid shapes and vibrant hues of beige, green, yellow, and orange; and often feature such distinct features as bumps on the skin, stripes across the base, and shapes that range from tealights to snowman sized balls. Winter squash is easy to store, and provides an excellent source of vitamins A, B6, and C as well as such minerals as potassium. It tastes great baked, in soups, stirred into biscuits or pancakes, or baked into pies. We have come to rely on it as a major component of our winter meals.

This spring, we ordered our squash seeds last. Feeling unusually creative, we chose eight different varieties: a small orange pumpkin known as Baby Bear; a small lumpy variety of Hubbard called Blue Ballet; a green pumpkin called Buttercup; a gray-skinned kabocha called Confection; two kinds of delicata squashes; a butternut; and an acorn shaped variety called Tuffy. We also threw in a couple of types of summer squash: a yellow crookneck variety and something called zucchini that was more striped than green.

This summer, however, got off to a slow start. We planted some squash seeds that we had saved from the fruits of the previous year's harvest; they sprouted initially and then as we experienced one cold snap after another many died. In the meantime, our compost bin burst into bloom with a huge plethora of "volunteers".

Trying to maximize as many of the volunteers as we could, we transplanted the compost bin vines into our garden, and then watched with amazement as new volunteers continued to sprout, flower, and bear fruit from the edges of the compost heap. Figuring that we could never have too much squash, especially winter squash, we harvested the summer squash as it matured and then started to see winter squash growing fast, too. At the same time, though, we kept wondering why some of our favorite winter squash varieties weren't starting to slow up on plants at all. Particularly noticeable was the absence of delicata -- an oblong yellow and green striped variety -- and butternut -- a beautiful beige-brown fruit. It seemed inconceivable that the mood swings of our summer weather had prevented these squashes from growing when our garden was bursting with pumpkins, hubbards, acorns, and kabocha of various sizes and colors.

Adding to the puzzle of our summer garden of squash was a question of what was a winter squash and what was a summer one. At first, the answer seemed obvious. Anything that was light yellow, soft-skinned and small was a yellow crookneck. But when some green and white striped varieties began popping up in the compost bin, we were curious. Even though we had ordered a striped zucchini, we weren't expecting it to grow in the compost bin. We had neither planted nor bought zucchini for two years. Could these be remnants of our 2011 crop which had overwhelmed us?

One hazard of summer squash is that if it's not picked when it's small, it grows larger and larger and larger. The larger fruits often are more difficult to eat in the way that many appreciate summer squash -- lightly grilled or sautéed -- but they do make good soups, pizza crusts, breads, and cakes.

With that in mind, I cut three large yellow fruits of what I thought were yellow crooknecks to make into soup. As I cut the fruits, I noticed that while two sliced up quite easily as summer squash tends to do, the third one was tough and unyielding under the small all-purpose knife I was using, behaving more like a thicker-skinned winter squash. I put it aside, figuring we could try roasting it later and eating its innards while discarding the shell, much as we do with winter squash. I prepared the soup, which turned out to be delightfully flavorful, with the squash not cooking down to a mush but retaining some crispiness and flavor, much as a variety known as winter melon does.

In the meantime, some winter squash vines were beginning to yield big heavy fruits that I presumed were spaghetti squash, a variety that has become popular as a sort of substitute for pasta because after it has been cooked, its flesh will break up into spaghetti-like strands when forked. We figured that these squash were either coming from volunteer vines or seeds from the spaghetti squash we had harvested the previous year. Wanting to encourage the vines to produce new fruit, I cut several of the heavier fruits off and noticed that their bases had a color scheme very similar to the tough, unyielding fruit that I had presumed was an overgrown yellow crookneck squash. I began to wonder if, indeed, I had made the soup with winter -- rather than summer -- squash, and if the distinction really mattered.

To test the theory, we wrapped one of the fruits that we presumed to be spaghetti squash in foil and roasted it on the grill. My husband's first declaration was "This is spaghetti squash," but when I applied the fork test, it didn't break into noodle-like strands. Furthermore, it didn't quite taste like spaghetti squash. It had more of a pumpkin flavor. Was it the Baby Bear or the Buttercup?

About this same time, I read that squash plants often cross-pollinate, and that if you try to plant the seeds from a previous year's harvest, the seeds may produce a fruit of two or more varieties that hybridized through pollination. I began to worry that the use of the compost bin's volunteer plants coupled with our own haphazard planting of squash seeds without remembering which seeds represented which varieties was causing all of our plants to hybridize and that we would end up not with the diverse array of beautifully colored fruits we had been envisioning but more of a monochrome.

And then we discovered the seeds. Somehow, in the rush to get summer crops going after a slow start to summer, a lot of squash got planted from volunteers in the compost bin at the expense of the new seeds. I found myself laughing more in relief because the discovery convinced me that we weren't inadvertently engaging in a genetic modification of plants and offered an explanation for why we hadn't been seeing our favorite varieties coming into bloom in our garden. Having several full packs of seeds also filled me with delight because it meant I wouldn't have to buy new packets of these varieties at least for the next year. Even though seed companies warn that seeds they sell lose their germination power after a year, we have made several successful plantings with seeds from previous years.

A small green pumpkin that we decided might be either a Tuffy or Buttercup fell off its vine this afternoon. We cooked it on the grill, and found that its flesh came out as a beautiful yellow shade and had a fresh buttery sweetness, leading us to believe it is a Buttercup, which is a squash that should be allowed to cure a few weeks so that its interior flavor and outer shell toughness both improve. So we'll let the rest of these ones sit a few more weeks before diving into them again. And we'll continue to watch our vines, and dream of a brighter, more vibrant, and even more diverse array of squash to grace our garden next year.