What are you GROWING in the 2024 Garden? Squash Edition

Pumpkin Soup Video

Stuffed Squash Video

Seeds and Brands mentioned in the video

Winter Luxury Pumpkin – Sow Right Seeds / Seed Savers Exchange
Long Island Cheese Pumpkin – Baker Creek
Galeux d’eysines Pumpkin – Sow Right Seeds
Komo Komo Squash – Baker Creek
Sugar Pie Pumpkin – Little shop of seeds (no longer in business)
Jarrahdale Pumpkin – Sow Right Seeds

Spaghetti Squash – Gardener Basics
Red Kurt Squash – Baker Creek
Sibley Squash – Seed Savers Exchange
True Hubbard Squash – Gardener Basics
Baby Blue Hubbard – Baker Creek (2 years ago)

Zucchino Rampicante Squash – Baker Creek
Round Zucchini – Sow Right Seeds
Black Beauty Zucchini – Sow Right Seeds
Gray Zucchini – Baker Creek
Golden Zucchini – Sow Right Seeds / Sweet Yard Seeds
Cocozelle Zucchini – Sow Right Seeds / Sweet Yard Seeds
Straightneck Summer Squash – Sow Right Seeds
Early Golden Crookneck Summer Squash – Sweet Yard Seeds
Waltham Butternut Squash – Gardener Basics
Green Stripped Cushaw Squash – Baker Creek
Early White Scallop Squash – Gardener Basics
Yellow Scalloped Squash – Garden Saved
Bennings Green Tint Scallop Squash – Gardener Basics

Not Growing This Year
Delicata Squash
Dwarf Butternut

As a horticulturist, teaching and sharing this amazing world of growing your food, utilizing your harvest, and homesteading with our family, is a passion. Every week you’ll find us in the garden, working on another aspect of homesteading life, and occasionally just enjoying the wildness of raising a large family in the country. Welcome to the garden, to the kitchen, and to our small farm in South Carolina.

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Faith is like a seed; plant it in your heart. God gives the harvest at the appointed time. (Mark 4:26-27,28-29)

What’s up guys welcome back to shing Peppers Farm I’m Natasha and today we’re going to be continuing this conversation we are having about what we are going to be growing in the garden this year I almost dived into the pepper conversation however I just finished filming the tomatoes and the cucumbers

And I’m still not fully over the sickness that we’ve had growing around it’s just that winter yuck that everybody’s been dealing with and I get really rambly when it comes to the cers so we’re going to talk about squash next which I don’t know it’s there’s a lot of

PLS so if you’re wondering what we’re going to be growing this spring and why we’re going to be growing it what we’re not going to be growing and why stay tuned we’re going to get into this so this year I am planning on growing a lot of pumpkins I love pumpkins pumpkins are

Wonderful not only are they really fun to grow and extremely beautiful but there’s a lot of colonary uses for them they’re very very good for you healthy wise healthy wise healthwise and they’re just they’re wonderful you can make a pumpkin soup that’s just to die for I’ve

Made that I can link the video in the description of this one if you guys want and we just we really like pumpkins in our house pumpkin Tarts pumpkin muffins pumpkin bread now I want to make pumpkin stuff oh a pumpkin cookie would be good okay all right um anyways focusing okay so

Yes oh and and extra pumpkins that you grow and you don’t end up using you can feed to your animals if you have animals on your homestead because pumpkin has a natural Dew Waring element so you can feed it to your goats and your chickens and your sheep and all that stuff your

Pigs and it can benefit them in that way so it’s never a bad thing to grow pumpkins in your garden or on your homestead I love pumpkins if you can tell so we’re going to talk about what varieties we’re going to be growing this year now what I

Am going to say to you is I struggle with growing pumpkins and I struggle with growing pumpkins because sometimes they have a very long growing time and we get Vine bores so badly here and we’ve tried everything we’ve tried wrapping your squash in an Ace bandage

Or aluminum foil we do name oil and handpicking and squishing but eventually what happens is no matter how diligent you try to be when you have five kids and 75 million farm animals and an entire Garden that can grow a ton of food you can’t get to every single plant

It’s impossible and I try to take the path of least resistance in gardening which means I don’t want to create more work than necessary for myself I want gardening to be enjoyable I want it to be something that I love and look forward to and not something that

Becomes a headache or tiring or frustrating and when you put a ton of effort into your plants and then they don’t grow it’s extremely frustrating so the way that we deal with the vine bores is if we notice that there is a lot of P pressure damage happening we try to pay

A little bit more attention we squish them we remove leaves that have eggs we are going to try to cover some of our squash with row covers just long enough to allow the plant to mature another big thing that we are going to do is grow our squash on the ground because with

Squash if a part of the squash gets damaged you can cover that section with dirt and as the squash continues to grow along the ground it will put new roots in if it’s not too far gone so we can help prolong the plants that way but in

Years past the best thing that we’ve ever done is just continue to succession sew them we will start squash seeds every few weeks really throughout the summer and replant them in so that way there’s something continually happening pumpkins are are a bit of a challenge though because they take longer to

Develop and things like your Patty pants or your zucchinis or your summer squash so one of the pumpkins that I’m really excited about is a winter luxury pumpkin this is from soite seeds right here you can find these at soite seeds.com or Amazon I am not affiliated with any of

These seed companies I am not promoting them I am just telling you what we like what we grow and how it works the winter luxury pumpkin this one’s about 6 lb and it has this really cool frosted look to it so it’s a really great display

Pumpkin for the patio or in the house fall decoration wise it also has a really good flavor it does a great job as being a pie pumpkin or muffin pumpkin so this is a really good one and I have a ton of seeds for this actually I have

Some from soite and then I also have some from Seed Savers exchange this is a a good company as well got seed fluff everywhere this is a long island cheese pumpkin this is one of my favorite pumpkins to grow I love this this is amazing as a pumpkin pie is

Very very good it is naturally sweet and it is delicious it’s about six to 10 pounds it’s a beautiful ribed pumpkin it’s kind of flat I love this pumpkin so yay for this you can tell I have a ton of seeds it’s safe I really like that

One okay this is the one that this is one of the ones that I’m most excited about growing but I’m not excited about saying on camera I have a couple of these actually so Seth might need to come over here or at least instruct me on how to say these

So I don’t totally embarrass myself Gallo Gallo deine no what deine deine da okay so this is a galoo deine pumpkin and it is a beautifully warted pumpkin this is gorgeous now some people don’t like a warted pumpkin I love it I think it is so pretty to look at obviously

It’s French we like to joke in this house that I replicate French about as well as jacqu crusto from The Pink Panther replicates American um English so it’s not super great but this is a really really beautiful pumpkin and it is supposed to be very sweet so I’m

Really excited about this one up next we have the coma coma squash this is an heirloom from New Zealand it is a beautiful squash just a really cute teeny tiny little pumpkin it was good last year it produced it didn’t take very long to produce so really like that

Your traditional sugar pumpkin this has grown well in the past again I think this one’s is from The Little Shop of seeds can’t remember if they closed or not it might have been another company that did that I’m thinking of so if it is not that one I’m sorry Rouge yeah

Rouge I got that part Rouge Rouge the T okay I can’t say that see might be they just rame it and say it like this pumpkin right here the Rouge VI thep yeah exactly I’m terrible of this it’s just a really big almost Cinderella like pumpkin it’s obviously French and

It’s a more of a flattened pumpkin with a red orange look to it it’s supposed to be about 20 lb and used traditionally for French chefs in making soup stock so I’m really excited about this not excited about pronouncing it though later in the season so a jar Dale

Pumpkin it’s I don’t know I just think it’s really cool it’s almost like a white green colored pumpkin I have High Hopes hopefully they don’t come crashing down this is another big pumpkin it’s about 12 to 18 in a lot of these I’m growing not only for the way

They look but also the fact that they’re supposed to be good meaty pumpkins I am not growing delicata squash not because I do not like delicata squash but because delicata squash does not like me I cannot grow delicata squash now I don’t know if it’s these seeds these I

Have no idea I have tried growing Delotta Splash every single year in my garden and not once have I gotten a delicata squash not one time I do not know why but I am taking a year off from the Delotta squash and I will try again next

Year but I think it doesn’t want to see me and I don’t want to see it right now so we’re going to take some time apart and then we have spaghetti squash okay I will definitely be going growing spaghetti squash spaghetti squash is great it was very very prolific we had a

Volunteer spaghetti squash from our compost last year that produced I want like 20 spaghetti squashes it was outrageous the number of squashes It produced it was really good spaghetti squash is um it’s about 3 to four pounds obviously you can make spaghetti out of it these seeds came from Gardener Basics

You can get them off of Amazon I’m sure they also have a website but this variety grows pretty well for us and the great thing about spaghetti squash and even a lot of squashes in general especially a winter variety of squash is you can Harvest

Them when they are under ripe if you do that you want to cure them in a dark place I will typically put them in my cabinet in my fake Pantry in the living room and just leave them there and they will ripen I had some spaghetti squash

That took four or five months to fully ripen because they got picked early but they had gotten Vine boore damage and I was either going to let them kind of decompose naturally there bring them in the house all right up next we have the red Cy squash this was a really

Cute little Japanese winter squash it was I don’t know 5 lbs maybe it says it can get up to 10 ours were pretty small they did get attacked by the vine bores but so does everything else that’s a squash in our growing zone so these were just super cute decent little fruits I

Will say eating them there wasn’t a lot of meat to them to the point that you could almost argue a case for not growing them in future there was not a lot of substance to these little fruits however if you’re growing them for the purpose of fall decoration they store

For a really long time so you can make a really beautiful table display or porch display or something with with these cute little squashes and sometimes it’s fun to grow things for that purpose sometimes it’s okay to grow things that aren’t just for preserving and eating purposes you can grow things just

Because you enjoy them too and so we are going to grow this again because it was a cute fun little squash to grow up next we have the sibl squash this will be our first year growing the sibl squash this is from Seed Savers this was given to me

By a friend so I’m excited to try these ones out the true Hubbards are sometimes used as a trap squash so sometimes people will plant their hubard squashes in between their other squashes like their pumpkins or what have you because Vine Wars seem to be very attracted to those particular

Varieties I can’t really attest to whether or not that’s something that’s worked for us in the past because I haven’t grown a lot of hubard squash I’ve been a little nervous to we are going going to give it a go this year these are from Gardener Basics this is

Just your traditional true hubard squash it’s supposed to be about 15 lbs and then we have a baby blue hubard from Baker Creek that I got a couple of years ago I think I may have planted one or two this is about six lbs so we’ll see

How these do this year but we are going to be using a lot of our squash as Vining ground cover sprawls out and Vines everywhere so around things like our corn our sunflower are taller crops that are going to go in the perennial garden which does sound a little odd

Because they are annual plants but we are starting perennials from seed I’m going to put a lot of those in the kitchen Garden so I can baby them and pay attention to them and they will go in the perennial garden this next fall you want to always keep your soil

Covered if you haven’t tried doing that in the past it’s probably one of the best tips I can give you is try to keep your soil covered whether you use a straw mulch or you use wood chips which we do you want to keep your soil covered

There’s a lot of benefits to the microorganisms in your soil and the rate in which you’re going to retain and hold moisture when you keep your soil covered and you can do this by the means that I just talked about or you can do this by using natural plant coverings with

Things like sweet potatoes or squashes however they can be a bit of a bully because they grow so well and so large they can bully other smaller plants so you want to be sure that after you’re using squash as ground cover you are using them in your taller varieties of

Plants things like tomatoes things like sunflowers or corn Aller varieties of plants and flowers can be really really great if they are interplanted with squash right up next we have our our zucchini SL summer squash section there’s a lot of zucchini okay something that I will always grow

Is going to be Zuko rampante squash this is an Italian heirloom variety this grows a really really big squash this was wonderful in the garden last last year its flavor was exceptional it was just a beautiful squash it tasted great so we’re definitely going to grow this

Again this year and it didn’t get overcome with Vine bores immediately it wasn’t one of the first things to go so I’m happy to grow this again next year van zucchini is one of my favorites to grow because it’s adorable who doesn’t love a round zucchini it’s a very Niche

Thing to grow really enjoy it you can also cut it up and make like zucchini fries and zucchini steaks from it which might not sound very good but it’s actually pretty tasty if you season it well have gray zucchini and black zucchini I will grow both plants I will

Grow more of the gray zucchini than the black zucchini because it grows better in my garden year after year the gray has produced better than the black zucchini now what I will say is the gray zucchini is typically considered to be a Mexican variety of zucchini so it does well in

Aid conditions which could be why it performs better for us here in the Southeast in South Carolina I will grow the black zucchini with the understanding that I know it’s not going to produce as well but because I enjoy growing different varieties of things I have some interesting varieties of

Zucchini the golden zucchini right here so not only is this kind of an interesting fun variety of zucchini to grow it’s supposed to be quite flavorful so I’m actually excited about this this is a newer variety as is the cocozelle variety of zucchini soite seeds in the

Front and then sweet yard seeds in the back I’ve used soite seeds they’ve done really well I have not used sweet yard seeds yet so I’ll let you know how those grow in the garden tours this year this is just a really pretty variety of zucchini with the stripes on it and I

Like to grow things that we can eat and store and preserve but I also like to grow a beautiful garden because it’s it’s enjoyable it’s Living Art it’s fun for me to walk outside and look at all the plants and really enjoy being outside with it looking exceptionally

Beautiful so this is going to be a fun variety that I haven’t grown in the past it looks really interesting and then summer squash okay I don’t love summer squash I hate to to say it but I don’t I love pumpkins I love zucchini that’s pretty good a butternut squash is my

Absolute favorite I could eat butternut squash for days I’m not a big fan of summer squash however I’m going to grow it because we do use it but I’m not going to grow a ton of it and I have straight neck summer squash and I have the early summer crook neck summer

Squash both of these have grown really well in the past so I am going to grow some of these because if we have extra I’m I’m going to give it to people I love to feed people I have a dream of one day being able to feed people out of

Our garden if I could feed the entire world I would so I will grow these because I have the space and happily and joyfully give them out to people anywhere and everywhere we will eat some of them I’m just not a super big summer squash fan then we have winter butternut

Squash butternut squash is my favorite squash as I mentioned it’s also my lol’s favorite version of squash between her and I we can knock out a pan of butternut squash all on our own now the other household family members aren’t quite as invested in the butternut as we

Are but that’s because we’re extra awesome it’s really good so Butternut is something that I will grow now I have tried growing dwarf Bush varieties of Butternut it’s one of the varieties of seeds I’m not going to be growing this year because peeling squash is it’s work it’s

A chore it’s not like it’s a hard thing to do but it takes time and for me I would rather grow larger varieties at things that I don’t have to make the same repetitive effort with with the with the smaller Bush varieties now what I will say with the smaller dwarf

Variety of Butternut they were very prolific but it would take two or three of those fruits to equal one traditional butternut squash and we have a big family there are seven people in our family and we eat a lot of food and so I need bigger varieties of productive

Fruits so that way my grocery budget isn’t astronomical and so as far as it goes the winter Butternut this is just your standard walum butternut squash I love this it’s fantastic I will always grow that not going to grow the smaller variety this year though and then I have

A green striped Kush squash this got attacked by Vine bores pretty much right out of the gate I only got a couple of these fruits last year at all no I do think I do think I’m going to grow it again because last year is my first year

Growing it but I don’t have High Hopes scallop squash and I have a LoveHate relationship the kids loved stuffed scallop squash it is one of their favorite things to eat and that sounds really weird because you don’t really think kids and squash go hand in hand

But if you take a scallop squash and you puree the inside and you sauté onions and sausage and bacon and cheese and you put it all together and restart it’s amazing so we like stuffed scallop squash in this house we might actually have it for dinner tonight because I

Have some in the freezer that I pulled out but as far as the scallop squash goes I’ve grown so many varieties of scallop squash in the past it’s astronomical what I will say is I really really loved the early white because you can Harvest it when it is young as a

Summer squash or you can let it get really big and ripen all the way and it turns into almost a pumpkin like fruit this is a fully ripe white scalp squash which is no longer white this can be scooped out and eaten the same way you would eat a pumpkin this has been

Sitting in my fake Pantry for about 4 five months now same with my butternut squash over here I’m probably going to need to cook this one in the near future but I still have squash in the pantry it’s January so that’s they’ve been doing a really good job so

Continuing on to the scallop squash and we also have our standard yellow scallop squash that one’s done really well I like them but you only need so much summer scallop squash it’s just the truth we also have a benning’s green tent scallop squash this has been really

Good in the past so that’s where we’re leaving it I’m not going to go super crazy I’m going to use those three varieties probably do a couple different plants and limit the scallop squash this year CU besides stuffing it I don’t have a ton of scallop squash recip so we’re

Going to limit those a little B and that is going to cover the squash pumpkin section of what we are going to be growing this year so if you guys have some really interesting varieties of squash that you’re going to be growing this year if you have varieties that you

Have grown and you haven’t loved let me know if you have loved them let me know I love hearing from you guys I actually remember the majority of the comments that get posted if I don’t hear from certain people in a while I’m like I wonder where they are what they’re doing

Because I remember your screen names and your your comments that you written down so if you have any suggested varieties or any thoughts please write it in the comments and let me know and I look forward to hearing them so bye all