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From the Farm

A Blurb about Butternut

(The Story of a Squash)

One of this fall’s heaviest harvests was our butternut squash. With the help of Chewonki students, the farm crew harvested over 2250 pounds of butternut in September, but the squash’s story started long before the harvest.

In January, the farm purchased Waldo butternut squash seed from Johnny’s Selected Seed here in Maine. The seeds were planted in plastic seedling trays in mid-April, the seedlings graduated to the garden in mid-May, and the plants flourished all summer. Squash leaves are prickly and quick to vine, and many smooth-skinned butternut squash steadily grew under each plant.

As the leaves started to die back, students and farmers clipped the squash from the vine, weighed them, and moved them into storage in the Udder Way Out (the back entrance to the dining hall and a room that gets its name because it also serves as the entrance to Chewonki creamery where farm milk is pasteurized). The butternut squash needed to cure for a few weeks for the skin to harden before the kitchen can start to use the crop. Storage vegetables like butternut squash will last for a long time if kept in the right conditions: potatoes, beets and carrots like to be kept cool and damp, onions and garlic want to be cool and dry, but squash prefer to be kept in warm and dry conditions. The Udder Way Out is the right temperature and humidity level to keep our butternut usable through May of 2022, eight full months after they were harvested and just about the time that the next round of squash seedlings go into the garden. Here’s looking forward to plenty of soups and roasted squash in the coming months!

Megan Phillips