Butternut Squash

**Sowing:** Butternut squash is easy to raise from seed once soil has warmed to at least 65–70°F, sown a half inch to an inch deep in hills or rows spaced four to eight feet apart and later thinned to two or three plants per hill; where seasons are short, seedlings can instead be started indoors three to four weeks ahead and transplanted out after the last frost. **Siting and care:** It wants full sun and a well-drained, fertile, loose soil rich in organic matter with a pH between 5.8 and 6.8, plus plentiful and consistent moisture from emergence right through fruit fill; mulching helps hold that moisture and suppress weeds, while the sprawling, tendril-climbing vines benefit from generous space or a trellis and mounded soil at the base to discourage borers.

**Pests:** Squash bugs, striped cucumber beetles, aphids, slugs, spider mites and stem borers can all trouble the vines, and hand-picking, row covers put on at planting and removed before flowering, and destroying old plant residue after harvest are the main defenses; butternut squash itself is noted as resistant to squash vine borer. **Diseases:** Bacterial wilt, powdery mildew, scab, downy mildew and viral diseases affect the crop, and keeping foliage dry, watering early in the day, spacing plants for airflow, clearing weeds and diseased debris, and controlling cucumber beetles and aphids that spread these problems are the recommended countermeasures.

**Harvest:** Fruit is left on the vine until the rind has hardened and turned a uniform tan color, roughly 110 days after planting and before the first frost, then cut away with several inches of stem attached to help it keep. **Storage:** Curing the squash in a warm, dry place for about ten days hardens the skin and improves keeping quality, after which fruit stores best around 50°F with 50 percent humidity, reaching its best flavor after roughly two months of curing and remaining good to eat for three to six months.

**Culinary:** Butternut squash is grown chiefly as a food crop, its mild-flavored flesh roasted, sautéed, baked, pureed into soups, mashed into casseroles, or worked into breads, muffins and pasta dishes; its yellow flowers are also sometimes battered and fried or stuffed, and a half-cup serving at maturity supplies at least half the recommended daily vitamin A. **Ornamental:** Beyond the kitchen, its showy yellow blooms, colorful fruit and rapid, coarse-textured vines make it useful in edible landscaping, as ground cover over bare soil, or trained onto trellises and screens in larger gardens.

Butternut squash belongs to Cucurbita moschata, a species native to Central and South America. Long before European contact it had already been carried into every part of North America where it could be grown, becoming an established food plant among Indigenous peoples; the English word "squash" itself comes from the Narragansett term for the plant.