Here at Slightly Self-Sufficient HQ we’ve been very excited about growing our own winter squashes. We’ve never had enough space to grow them before. We did try a dwarf ‘Butternut’ squash variety last year in a large pot, but it didn’t produce any fruit. So upon seeing the garden in our new house for the first time, Liz and I exclaimed in unison that we could finally grow squashes!

Why have we been so excited to grow winter squashes? First and foremost, they make for excellent eating. They are a very versatile ingredient. They make fantastic soups and, unlike their cousins the pumpkins, they bring a lot of flavour to a soup. Their dense texture makes them an excellent meat substitute in curries and stews. Stuff them and bake them and they become a meal on their own. That’s just scratching the surface, the list goes on and on.

Secondly there are many, many varieties and they come in a remarkable plethora of shapes, colours and sizes. Just look through a decent seed catalogue and look at the diverse range of beautiful fruits that you could grow. And grow them you must, as almost without exception, they aren’t available in the shops. Supermarkets rarely stock anything but ‘Butternut’, or perhaps another very similar variety such as ‘Coquina’.

Occasionally a farm shop may have the odd interesting variety, which until now for us had been one of the main ways we had been able to sample any of the more interesting varieties. The other being the community garden we help out at, although I suppose that still comes under growing our own. We’ve been particularly intrigued by the ‘Spaghetti’ variety of squash. For those of you not familiar with them, upon baking the flesh is apparently transformed into strands that can be used as a spaghetti substitute. We’ve never seen one for sale. We unsuccessfully tried to grow them at the community garden. Other volunteers apparently planted the seeds but as the season progressed it became apparent that none of the squash plants were actually ‘Spaghetti’ squashes.

The third reason is their superb keeping qualities. Once we’ve hardened them off we should be able to keep them in the store cupboard and use them over the winter. So that’s why we were so excited about growing winter squashes when we first saw the garden. Fast forward four months and we’re more excited that ever before about growing our own squashes. In those four months we choose the varieties we most wanted to try, ordered the seeds, planted the seeds, cleared an area of turf to enable us to create the pumpkin patch, planted the squash plants out and watered them over the summer. Now we are excitedly watching the fruits as they mature, delighted that at the moment we are on course to have at least one fruit of each of the varieties we most wanted to try. So without further ado, here is an image slider containing some photos that I took today.

A ‘Brandywine’ tomato

We also have a winter squash plant growing in the vegetable patch at the bottom of the garden. We don’t know what the variety is. It looks like some kind of yellow onion squash. Our neighbour gave us the seeds and said she doesn’t remember what the variety was called, but she thinks it’s Italian. She dubbed them ‘exotic’ squash, so that’s how we refer to them now. We’ve harvested a couple of these already, but we haven’t tried them yet. This one looks like it’s pretty much ready too:

An ‘Exotic’ squash growing in the vegetable patch.

Also in the vegetable patch are our beetroot. The following photo is of the beetroot that I planted back in June and posted about at the time. I’ve posted photos of these two beetroot a couple of times since in image sliders on posts here and here. Here’s today’s photo, haven’t they grown?

Our most mature beetroot in the vegetable patch.

Next to those two beetroot is the row of parsnips. They’re looking good too. Unforunately I accidentally harvested one quite prematurely today. A fat hen plant had shot up almost overnight and as I pulled it up I accidentally brought a parsnip up too. The one I pulled up looked good though, in as much as it was quite straight, despite my fears about them being coiled as I started them in those paper pots.

Parsnips growing in the vegetable patch

The prematurely harvested parsnip.

Now on to the final thing I’d like to share today. In the vegetable patch at the bottom of the garden I planted a couple of cucumber plants of the variety ‘Paris Pickling’, also known as ‘Cornichon de Paris’. As the name suggests, this variety is traditionally grown for pickling. I had planned to pickle my own gherkins. However, the hedgerow seems determined to expand into the area currently occupied by one of these plants, which, like their relatives the squash plants in the pumpkin patch, like to sprawl.

When looking at one of these plants today, I noticed it had sprawled towards the hedgerow, which had grown over it. On this part of the plant I found these absolutely enormous would-be gherkins. I somehow don’t think I’ll be pickling these, at least not in the same way I originally envisaged!

Some overgrown ‘Paris Pickling’ cucumbers along side the jar I’d hope to pickle a couple of dozen of them in.