Butternut Squash

Hi All
I have saved some seeds from my Butternut Squash I grew last year is there any point in sowing these or should I bite the bullet and pay the absolutely ridiculous price for new fresh seeds???


Cheers

DAve

 

If the seeds you originally sowed were F1 then don't plant the ones you kept.

if you had ANY other Squash family nearby (including Courgettes) then don't sow them. Squash are very promiscuous and the resulting fruits will be Heinz Allsorts!

You might be OK, you might get something new and novel ... or you could spend 7 or 8 months growing something that then turned out to be a dud.

If you find the F1 seeds too expensive then buy in the Autumn sales (which is what I do - 50p-a-packet, which works out a larger saving on expensive things of course), or sow a Heritage / Open pollinated variety and keep your own seeds (but you must prevent cross pollination)

I think the folk that do heritage varieties are:
www.realseeds.co.uk

 

Butternut squash are a trendy veg, despite not growing very well in the UK and not being very exciting to eat- although few squashes are very reliable. So seed prices tend to be high and seed merchants make extravagant claims. I would think about growing other varieties such as Mesa Queen.

http://www.organiccatalogue.com/Seeds-Vegetables-Vegetables-S-Z-Squashes/c21_22_43_114/index.html

This company sells a good range of squash seeds at varied prices. I find there are usually enough left over for next year.

 

Sorry to bump an old thread but I thought it would save me making a new one as this one was quite recent.

I took some butternut squash seeds from the seed swap this year and was wondering if it was worth sowing these or buying a more reliable variety. The seeds I took don't say what variety they are or even who donated them otherwise I would have contact the member and asked by now.

I had this idea of growing squashes up some nets at the ends of my vegetable beds to save space and was wondering if there is a better variety that will do this, be more reliable and taste similar to butternut squash.

My mum gave me some Patty Pan Custard White Squash seeds and I was wondering if basically all the squashes taste the same or similar to each other, a bit like tomatoes and potatoes do.

 

Hi JJ,
Don't bother with patty-pan squashes if you want a taste explosion! Butternuts are really tasty in comparison. I'm not sure about availability recently, but Wilko's used to do seed quite cheaply.
Butternuts cubed, sprinkled with salt, pepper and olive or sesame oil then baked until soft are pretty yummy.....

 

I'm assuming the patty pans taste similar to water then! If they are like the little yellow flying saucer courgettes I find them OK, but I think those are a summer squash.

All of the family need a bit of something else to, erm, bring out the flavour!
Jungle Jane, I think the basic flavour (if you can call it that) of all of the winter squashes is similar, with slight differences in colour and texture. When I've grown butternut squashes I've found that it is hard to get more than 3 or 4 ripened on each plant before winter, if that. They are quite bulky plants so it doesn't seem like good value.
I recommended Mesa Queen because I have had a bit more success with productivity - but by no means infallible, sometimes they just won't get going, like last year. Also, they are a bit smaller and come in good meal-sized portions for a single person. They have dark green skin and bright orange flesh which I find appealing. Delicata have a good rep for flavour but I have found them particularly nesh.
If you wanted the greatest amount of edible material for the space/effort put in, pumpkins would provide it, rather than the smaller individual squashes as they are more reliable in our climate. But less cute, of course, and you have try to get through them fast before they go off.

 

PS, I have grown Mesa Queen on some sort of netted frame and it worked! These are the ones.

http://www.organiccatalogue.com/See...14/p2696/SQUASH-Table-Queen/product_info.html

Aromatic, huh? Don't seed merchants talk a lot of crip, to paraphrase wot's er name.

 

Shiney gave me some Butternut Squash seeds years ago, quite the best I have ever grown, and open pollinated. I assume he'd be able to give me seed forever, or that I would get a crop every year and could keep my own seed, but a run of 2 lousy summers put paid to that, and now neither Shiney nor I have that variety any more. I kick myself each Autumn at Butternut Harvest Time as a consequence :(

Of course they take up a huge amount of space, so growing some seeds from the Seed Exchange on the off-chance that they might be winners may not be prudent space-wise. (All forms of Squash / Courgettes / Marrows are very inter-variety promiscuous, so they need big segregation space if you want to keep your own seed from Good'Uns)

I would suggest smaller fruit sizes. The Big'Uns have considerable weight to them.

Snap

Snap x 2. The big "Shiney" Butternuts represented a huge meal, even with the whole family round for Sunday Lunch we struggled to use a whole one. Fine for anyone who wants to Prep & Freeze, or convert to Soup or whatever, but a smaller-fruit variety might suit the average household better.

They are varieties like Hunter or Cobnut which mature a lot earlier (by virtue, I think, of setting fruit when "younger"), but as with many of such things I think it is a compromise. I have found I enjoy then them less. Perhaps when the fruit set, on a younger plant, it has less "power house" of leaf area to devote to the plant's young fruits? Or maybe I just haven't looked after them very well, and with better husbandry they taste fantastic? Be interested in other people's thoughts.

I haven't grown any other Squash [other than Butternut] so I have no comparison point, but I do read on the forums of people who love This or That small-fruited squash (i.e. varieties other than Butternuts). The early-fruiting Butternuts (e.g. Hunter and Cobnut) are F1 - so no chance of keeping useful seed for yourself for next year with them. Best to buy them in the Autumn "last-year" seed sales to sale seed-cost.

 

What variety are you growing these days @shiney ?

 

Thanks to everyone for their help.

So in order to grow butternut squashes I need the following: lots or space
a good summer
and a packet of seeds that haven't cross-bred with another squash.

I was going to grow some courgettes this year so I may give the seeds away as courgettes seem more productive than butternut squashes.

I can build a structure which would take the weight but I'm assuming sticking one of these seeds/seedlings in a large pot of manure, away from my courgettes, with some kind of ott trellis work and hoping for the best would be a silly idea?

I'm now trying to figure out now what else I could grow up these frames I was going to stick at the end of each vegetable bed now.

 

a good summer or an early maturing variety

In summer, definitely - but useless for the winter - can't store them, and converted to anything freezable they are mush - which is only useful for thickening stew etc (my opinion as we don't eat out-of-season much/at all, so frozen Summer veg to eat in Winter is not something we do - we grow Winter Veg for the Winter, and by the same token I don't want to eat Leeks in Autumn, let alone Summer )

The Hungry Gap, in early Spring, is the only exception.

No, that's a fine idea. Doesn't have to be away from Courgettes (unless you want to keep your own seed for next year - the fruit,. borne this year, will be fine. Sweetcorn is the only thing that I know that can be mucked up by having two varieties cross-pollinate such that the "fruit" in the CURRENT season is mucked up)

Its common to plant Squash / Pumpkins / etc. in a compost heap (i.e. a heap being left to "mature" for Next year for example)

 

£1.83 a Kilo? Although Waitrose prices (first result in Google ) I preferred the price of the Free Seed I use to get from @shiney