When life gives you a bad tulip year… you make it a standout squash year!!! I remember a few short months ago we were disappointed by an underwhelming spring tulip yield, a time of year where we are craving growth and bounty. But we shan’t dwell on that too much because luckily we don’t put all our eggs in one basket, we put our eggs in a hundred different baskets! By that I mean we plant over a hundred different varieties of plants.

This year we planted 9 varieties of winter squash planted over 3 acres and 3 different fields. After prepping beds with black plastic for weed suppression and drip irrigation, we leave them and move onto more important summer things like trellising tomatoes and picking peas, forgetting about squash until their foliage is so big and bountiful and their fruits start to show their colors. Then after the tomatoes die we can once again realize we really did grow a lot of squash. After the first frost kills back some foliage to reveal fruits, we start to harvest and plan for our big bulk-out.

This year we harvested our squash over 3 days, filling a total of 74 macro bins. We estimated that we brought in 45,000 pounds of squash! We play a game we like to a call squashball, where one person tosses squash from the ground to a second person, who places the squash in a big macro bin for storage, and it makes me feel like I’m playing high school sports again. Our bodies our sore, energy is high, and we get to use a lot of sports lingo. We did it, team! Another squash year down and a lot to show for it.

I hope people have dusted off their big soup pots because ’tis the season. I just made my first squash soup of the season this weekend. Feels like a holiday or something. Anyways, I am very proud of what we have all accomplished and I hope you enjoy your first delicata of the season. I like to fry an egg in my delicata rounds.

Now we will prepare to plant tulips again, and we’ll hope and prep for a good tulip year next year, but not jinxing the squash.

~Julia