Pumpkins and Winter Squash

The final two rows have been planted. I know the picture has three rows, but the one in the middle will be split to make the two outside ones wider. Keeping them narrow for now helps get the water closer to the plants when they are small. The mounds you see are directly over where the seeds are planted. The soil is moist enough to sprout the seeds as long as its covered by five or six inches of dirt. The top one to two inches dries up pretty quickly so the mound over them keeps it from getting too dry. On Thursday evening, I'll rake the mounds flat and if my timing is right, the seeds will have sprouted and be emerging just underneath the original ground level. By next week at this time, they should all be up and growing. Now that the warm weather finally arrived, things get going quickly.

Pumpkins are fun to grow because they are so easy. The only thing that hurts them is powdery mildew and in most years around here, it doesn't get too bad until September and by that time I won't care if the vines die back. The sun is not too intense and very few pumpkins ever get sunburned from lack of vine cover. If any die hard pumpkin farmers are reading this, don't get offended and think I'm capping on your farming skills. But they really are pretty easy to grow. I've probably jinxed this now and all kinds of problems I never imagined will hit the pumpkins this year. We'll keep our fingers crossed. There are four varieties planted; a standard jack-o-lantern type, a small baking type; a white colored one; and a ginormous one that is supposed to get up to three hundred pounds. In this day and age, probably ninety nine percent of pumpkins grown do not end up being eaten. That's kind of sad since they grow so easy and are very nutritious. My personal favorite dish is the good old traditional pumpkin pie. We first cooked a pumpkin and used it for a pie sometime back around 1977. I still consider that the best pumpkin pie I ever had. If you do this, you'll never want to cook with canned pumpkin again. The easiest way to cook them is to cut into wedges, scrape the seeds out, put on a cookie sheet and bake until soft. After they have cooled down, scrape the flesh away from the rind and mash it up with a potato masher. Since pumpkins tend to yield quite a bit, both in size and numbers, my plan is to research other recipes to use them. I've heard they make good soup also.

The super large variety should be interesting to grow. There are many people who grow these to try and win contests for the largest pumpkin. Some of the really giant ones I've seen don't even look like pumpkins. They are more pink than orange and they don't grow in the shape of a pumpkin. They look lopsided to me. This variety I found is described as looking like a traditional pumpkin and the picture on the package looked pretty cool. We'll see how it turns out. I might have to carve them with the chainsaw and use a few pieces of firewood instead of a candle.

Winter squash are always good to plant if you think famine might be in your future. Once they are fully mature, they keep for months without deteriorating. This lack of perishability is what first roped me into growing them commercially back in the Eighties. Everything else we grew was very perishable and if they weren't harvested, packed and sold within a couple of days of peak maturity, their value dropped off the face of the cliff. These types of squash could be picked into bins and packed as sales were made. It was a great way to keep crews busy on slow sales days because they could pack ahead of time, within reason. I say within reason, because like most life lessons I've had to learn, reason can be a hard target to hit sometimes. In 1984, we planted a few acres of acorn, butternut, and spaghetti squash. Being a little too excited about the lack of perishability with these squashes, we came up with the grand idea of maximizing the efficiency of dedicating a crew to harvesting and field packing these. We put around forty people on this job and in about a week, we had over twelve thousand cases packed. We stacked them on pallets and hauled back to the main ranch. One shop was cleared out and served as warehouse for all of these. Double stacked pallets of packed squash filled this building. At this point in time, all we could see were pallets stacked up waiting for orders. For the first few weeks, it was easy money. When an order came in, just jump on a forklift and load on to the truck. Naturally things can't be this easy for too long. It turns out these squash do deteriorate, just not quickly. Not at the same rate either. We started to notice a few cases with one or two broken down squash in them. This meant we needed to unstack each pallet as we pulled them out to fill orders and check each case to make sure they were all of good quality. By the time we got to the last couple thousand cases left to sell, we had to repack into brand new boxes because some of the breakdown had damaged the box to the point of it not being usable. We were lucky the prices were not too bad that year and it still made sense to do all of this repacking. We did learn in subsequent years to be patient and keep the unpacked squash in bins and just pack a few days ahead. Not as efficient as the previous method initially, but more so in long run. For the Farmville Reality Project, there is just acorn and butternut squash planted. Acorn squash are great just baked with light seasoning. They as well as the butternut are also good baked and mashed with saltine crackers. Butternut is actually a really good substitute for pumpkin in pie recipes. Its bright orange flesh makes for better color than straight pumpkin, which can be a little pale sometimes. All in all, if you can include pumpkins and winter squash in your lineup, you will not be disappointed.