Grow Butternut Squash Instead of Pumpkins

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When I was a kid, my father the farmer would have a few spare pieces of land leftover. This was after planting his potato and grain crops. The odd-shaped plots among them were typically planted with something that didn’t take much in the way of cultivation. Squashes seemed best for these spots because he could easily manage them from the fringes without having to drive a tractor and run over the every-which-way vines. We had plots of blue hubbard and acorn squashes, butternut squash, watermelons and—my favorite—musk melons.

On a hot summer day working on the farm, we’d stroll over to the melon field, slice open a melon, and share it amongst us. Can’t do that with a delicata.

And yes, we had pumpkins. We grew them to then sell on flat-bed trucks from the barn yard. My sister would man the pumpkin truck on the weekends and Dad would let her keep some of the profits. After a time, though, she left for college and the many new “agri-tainment” enterprises filled the public’s pumpkin needs.

Pumpkin crops on Long Island also were becoming more frequently hit by disease for some reason or another. “City folks” didn’t seem to notice that the pumpkins at the U-pick patches were all off the vine already, having been shipped in by truck from some undiseased location and then scattered about the field.

Why I Don’t Grow Pumpkins

In all my years of gardening, I’ve never grown pumpkins. And honestly, I’ve never had the desire to grow the most famous of autumnal squashes.

Why is that, you ask? The goal of vegetable gardening—I should say the goal of MY vegetable gardening—is to use the harvest in the kitchen. From a cooking standpoint, everything I would or could do with a pumpkin, I find easier to do with a butternut squash.

An Easier Squash: Butternut

Butternuts are easier to “manhandle,” I guess you could say. They are way easier to peel, cut into equal segments and boil/roast/sauté. And if you really want roasted pumpkin seeds, butternut seeds are totally acceptable roastable substitutes.

And the stems of butternut squash are solid, making it less susceptible to my arch-nemesis the squash vine borer. I did grow butternuts one year and was quite happy with my plant’s performance. And from what I can recall, the butternut squash held up well to powdery mildew, too.

The one thing that’s hard to do with a butternut that you can do with a pumpkin is carve it into a Jack-o-lantern. No squash can be all things to all people, I suppose.

BTW, that Jack-o-Lantern above? That’s an Instagram pic from my awesome iPhonographer friend Kathy Tarnoff. If you’re on Instagram and want to follow someone who takes beautifully framed pics of landscapes (and cats), she should be on your radar. Find her @ktarnoff.

Meet Ellen Wells

When you’re raised on a farm, you can’t help but know a thing or two about gardening. Ellen Wells is our expert on edible gardening.…

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