Food Talk to me about squash and pumpkins

[parsonswife]

Other than store bought pumpkin pie carving them as a kid I know nothing about pumpkins. I do buy acorn and butternut squash but at the store today I saw all kinds. Baby blue Hubbard, kabocha, carnival, delicate, sweet dumpling, Sweet meat Squash.......I've always just considered them all ornamental. Which ones do you like and how to prepare them?

 

[moldy]

Delicate is delicious, a little sweeter than the others, but lots of seeds. I wont grow again. I like long island cheese squash..looks like a flatter light orange pumpkin, but very good to eat mashed with butter and sweet spices.

 

[PJM]

My current favourite is a North Georgia Candy Roaster squash. It’s a banana squash and mine usually come out at 10-12 pounds. They make a great pie, soup or just mashed with butter. They sweeten as they age and are great keepers.

 

[To-late]

I like the little about 8” pie pumpkins for pie. They make a good sweetened dish scraped and sweetened with pie spices. Sorta like a butternut squash .
The big ones for decorations. Jack’o lanterns
You need lots of growing space. To grow them healthy.

 

[Grouchy Granny]

I grew the Sugar Pie pie pumpkins one year - if you do grow pie pumpkins you need to figure out how to keep the squirrels out of them! They love the sweet taste!

Nasty little buggers ate almost the entire crop (I had about 25 pumpkins) and only left me 2.

Haven't grown them since, except for the volunteer which came up this year in a part of the yard that the squirrels don't really go to because of the dogs. One has a few chew marks, but the other one is ok.

Had a great crop of spaghetti squash (harvested 28) of them. So next year I'm planting more of those and acorn squash. I bought a squash trellis from Gardner's Supply for next year. It's 80-in tall and 64-in wide, so we'll see how this works out. Putting it in a raised bed that was fallowed this year and has sprinkler system as well.