Overrun with Squash

Our friend Anna lives across the road. She has a catering business and she uses almost exclusively fresh local produce. If I have extra of something, she’ll buy it and plan a menu around it. She loves the Georgia Roasters and any other squash I grow. Squash was one crop that did exceptionally well this year. (The pig manure we spread on the garden might have helped.) Yesterday afternoon, Anna and I brought most of the Georgia Roasters, the spaghetti squash, the blue kuri squash, and the buttercup squash into the greenhouse to cure. The Georgia Roasters are those long orange squash. We picked at least 30 of them.

There are at least another half a dozen Georgia Roasters out in the garden yet, but they were mixed in with the butternut squash—which still need a few days to ripen—and I didn’t want to trample the vines. I thought I had planted red kuri squash, too, but either it was mislabeled or I didn’t plant it after all. We are both excited to try the blue kuri.

Anna will use some of the Georgia Roasters fresh and freeze some. The blue hubbards are still out in the garden, as are the pumpkins, the acorn squash and the butternut squash. The beans are drying on those racks on the far side of the greenhouse. They look good. After I pulled the buttercup and some of the Georgia Roaster vines, I found several cabbages and some pepper plants. The cabbages grew nicely and probably will end up as sauerkraut.

We did not get the potatoes dug because the husband changed the oil in my Jeep after I got home from church. They can wait. I also brought in another wagon load of tomatoes. We have guests coming this week, but after they leave, salsa production begins. I am hoping to have all the canning done by the end of September.

We still haven’t had a frost. Unusual, but not unheard of. And I watched Ryan Hall’s video yesterday about the slight change in the El Nino forecast. This El Nino is still historic, but he noted that the tongue of warm water is closer to Japan than to the US, and when that happens, it’s possible that our part of the country will get more cold coming down from Canada instead of being warmer than average. Theoretically, if some of that cold combines with an atmospheric river, we could get snow and a lot of it.

[This is me praying for a hard winter to clear some of these transplants out of here. 🙏🏻]

The snowiest winter on record in Seattle happened during an El Nino winter (1968-69) when Seattle got 67.5 inches of snow. (Knowing what happens there when all they get is snow flurries makes me think the whole place must have shut down for weeks.) Spokane got 93 inches of snow that winter. An El Nino winter doesn’t guarantee the weather will be warmer and drier than normal.

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Still no sewing. We’re so close to the end of National Sewing Month that I am not even going to try. I’d rather get all the canning and cleaning done and go into October with a wide open sewing schedule.