Why Some Squash Store for Months (And Others Don’t)

Añadido: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Now, you may be thinking, spaghetti squash or winter squash in a raised bed?

[00:00:04]That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

[00:00:07][music] What's up, lazy dog fam? Hope all y'all are having a fantastic day. It is Friday, May 1st, here in South Georgia.

[00:00:16]And on today's video, we're going to be talking about winter squash, the different types. Maybe help you figure out which type might be best for you to grow. Then, we're going to plant some, going to do a little experiment, one of our raised beds, and then plant some more. in one of our inground plots here behind me. So, just to be clear, we're not talking about these. We're talking about these or variations of these. So, I've got my summer squash planted right here. I was a little late getting them planted this year, but they'll be fine.

[00:00:46]Got half a row of grand prize, half a row of Golden Glory zucchini. And then in this bed and in this half of this plot, we're going to be planting some winter squash. So you've got your summer squash things like zucchini, yellow crook neck, yellow straight neck, patty pan, lots of different types of summer squash. Those are harvested immature with a soft rind. Then you've got your winter squash, and we'll talk about all the different types here in a minute.

[00:01:13]These are harvested at a mature stage with a hard rind. So we're talking about the same family here, all in the cucurbit family, but two different types of squash. And the naming conventions we use for these summer squash versus winter squash makes things kind of confusing. So the term winter squash doesn't mean that we grow it in the winter. Winter squash is a warm season vegetable, but it's called winter squash because these squash store longer. The harder rind allows them to store longer oftent times into the winter. So, you would harvest them in the warm season and they would store into the winter, hence the term winter squash. However, there are some regional differences as far as what winter squash might actually store into the winter. And we'll talk about that more in a minute, how growing winter squash in the deep south may not actually give you squash that will store into the winter, whereas if you're up north, they probably would. And from what I understand, across the pond, they refer to all winter squash as pumpkins, although they don't all look like pumpkins. Now, this simol here obviously looks like a pumpkin, but not all winter squash look like pumpkins. Here in the States, we use the term winter squash more because they don't all look like pumpkins. So, let's take a minute and talk about the three major types of winter squash. This is very important because different types of winter squash have different storage potential.

[00:02:45]Furthermore, some winter squash need to be planted relatively timely, especially if you live in a hot and humid climate.

[00:02:52]Other types can take the heat and take the pest pressure, and you can grow those in the hotter parts of the year.

[00:02:58]So, the first type of winter squash is the species cucumber pepo. Now, this is the same species as the summer squash like your zucchini, yellow crook neck, yellow straight neck patty pan. But these winter squash versions of sea pepo are harvested different. They're harvested when the rind is hard, a mature fruit versus an immature fruit like the yellow squash. And so some examples of winter squash in the sea pepo species would be spaghetti squash like we're going to plant later today.

[00:03:30]Your delicotta squash, your acorn squash, and even your jacko'lantern pumpkins are sea pepo. And these sea pepo winter squash are going to have the shortest storage potential. They have the thinnest skin. They don't store as long. They will store longer than a yellow crook neck or zucchini will, but they're not going to store for months.

[00:03:52]and months after harvest. So, you might get a month or so of storage out of them, maybe a month or two, depending on how they're being stored, but they'll have to be used relatively quick. Now, although these don't store as long, they can be some of the best tasting winter squash, the delicotta, the acorn. Those are really, really tasty winter squash varieties. So, you've got your C pepo winter squash, and then you've got winter squash that belong to the species cucumber maxim. we just say C maximum.

[00:04:23]And this species includes things like kabotaa squash, hubard squash, buttercup squash, and even some of your larger pumpkins. Those polar bear pumpkins that we grew for several years a while back, those are C maxima as well. And the flesh on all these tends to be orange, whereas some of your C pepo winter squash can have a lighter colored flesh.

[00:04:47]Most of these C maxima have that orange kind of pumpkin-y color to them and the flavor tends to get better as they store. So after you harvest them and let them sit there for a few weeks, the flavor tends to get sweeter and they'll taste a little bit better. Kind of like a sweet potato does. So how long do these C maxima types store? Well, I think it has a lot to do with your storage conditions and when you harvest these. So, if I'm going to grow C maxima winter squash or C maxima pumpkins, I need to plant them in the spring. I would end up harvesting them say midsummer. And the storage conditions under my barn, they're not really cooled or anything like that. It's just a shaded area there. I can usually get two, maybe even 3 months of storage out of them. If you lived in an area where you were growing them more throughout the summer, harvesting in the fall, and you had cooler storage conditions, you could probably get a longer storage out of those C maxima types. Down here with my storage ability in this hot and humid climate, you know, 2 3 months max usually. And then the last winter squash species we'll talk about would be your cucumber mashada or your sea mada. And this includes things like butternut squash, the simol pumpkins that we like to grow, and I think Cherokee tan pumpkins. May have heard of those. Those are sea macha as well. So, these sea mishada types have the thickest skin, which means they have the longest storage potential. They also tend to be a little more resilient to pest and diseases, and they tend to handle the heat and humidity a lot better than the other two species we talked about. So, for the first two, the C pepo and the C Maxima, if I'm going to grow those down here in the deep south, have to be kind of timely with my planting. I want to get them planted in early to midspring.

[00:06:44]Once the soil warms up, I want to grow them in the spring and early summer.

[00:06:49]They're not going to like our intense summers that much. But a lot of these sea machada types, they can handle the heat a lot better. A lot of times you can grow these through the hottest part of summer, even down here. Now, you might do better if you plant them in the spring, but if you're needing something to fill that gap in the hottest part of summer where there's not a whole lot of other stuff you could grow, you can grow some of these. And a lot of the sea macha types are squash vine bore resistant. I'm not sure that all of them are, but a decent amount of them are.

[00:07:26]These simult pumpkins tend to be squash vine bore resistant. Another reason you can grow them during the heat of summer when the pest pressure tends to be the highest. So the sea mashada type that we're going to plant today is not this right here. I still have some of these simol pumpkins from last year's harvest underneath the barn. Like I said, these store for a long long time. So I'm not going to plant any more of these today.

[00:07:49]Might plant some later this summer. The sea matada we're going to plant today is this honey nut butternut squash. So, we're going to plant some of the spaghetti squash, like I told you earlier, and then some of these mini butternut squash as well. So, the tavolei spaghetti squash going to be planted right here. And our honey nut butternut are going to be planted right there beside this beautiful, beautiful sweet corn. Now, you may be thinking, spaghetti squash or winter squash and a raised bed? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. These things vine all over the place. They need a lot of space. How are you going to confine them to a little raised bed? So, this Tavali spaghetti squash variety here tends to have more of a compact bush growth habit. It's not to say that the plants won't get decent size. They just won't sprawl as much as a traditional spaghetti squash would. Now, I have planted this variety before. It's been quite a few years. Never tried to grow it in a raised bed, though. So, this is going to be a neat little experiment to see if we can pull this off, see if it will stay relatively confined to that raised bed or if we end up with a jungle. And while we like spaghetti squash, it's nothing that we're going to eat two or three times a week like we would summer squash. So, this may be the perfect size planting for us here. I think two plants in this bed right here might [snorts] produce enough spaghetti squash to keep us happy for a little while. Even though we probably only need two plants in this 4x6 raised bed here, I'm going to plant more seeds than that.

[00:09:13]Probably won't plant all 20 that's in this packet here, but maybe six or eight. and then we'll pick the best looking ones. We'll thin them out later.

[00:09:21]And we don't really have to do any bed prep here. We've already done that. We did that when we planted our peppers a few weeks ago. So, we put down some coupe grow fertilizer, topped it off with mushroom compost, got our drip lines all straightened out here, and we're good to go. We'll probably plant our squash seeds down the middle here.

[00:09:38]These extra drip lines will come in handy, though. Those squash plants, as they vine, they will pin down more roots. So, we want to keep this entire bed moist, keep those plants fed. So, I'm just going to drop a few seeds here.

[00:09:51]Probably put four on this side.

[00:09:57]And then we'll probably put four on this side over here. Scoot that one over a little bit. Just kind of put them right beside some of these drip emitters here.

[00:10:08]I think ideally it would work out nice to have a plant right there and then a plant over here. But we'll see how these uh come up how they look once they come up. And I'm just going to kind of poke them down into the soil a little bit.

[00:10:21]Sprinkling out here right now. I'm supposed to get some more rain tomorrow, thank goodness. So should get some good moisture on these pretty soon. And hopefully they get up and going pretty quick. Now over here where we're going to plant this honey nut butternut squash, we need to install a drip line, but that will be easy to do because we already have this drip irrigation manifold or supply line in place. That's why I always run the mainline tubing from one end of the plot to the other end. Even if I'm not going to plant anything here immediately, I [snorts] have it there. So when I get ready to plant, all I got to do is plug in my drip tape lines. Did I tell y'all that corn was beautiful? Look at it, man.

[00:11:02]It's pretty, ain't it? So, we're just going to do one row here right down the center of this blank space because these butternut plants will crawl quite a bit.

[00:11:10]So, we just need to do our fad system here. We start out by making a furrow.

[00:11:14]Next, we'll amend that furrow or put down some pre-plant fertilizer in that furrow. So, I'm just going to take some of this coupe grow here and sprinkle it along that little trench there. Then, I borrow a line of drip tape from that plot over there that wasn't being used.

[00:11:28]Put it right here in that amended furrow. Hook it up to our main line.

[00:11:32]Then we cover up that tape with a wheel ho. And we're ready to plant. Now, I'm not going to plant my seeds directly on top of that berry drip tape there. I'll probably plant to the side. So, I've got a little furrow right there on that side. Little furrow right there on that side. Probably plant on this side, farther away from that corn right there.

[00:11:50]Although, that corn will probably be done before these plants here get to crawling a whole lot. Now, I probably didn't need the entire pack of 20 seeds for this one 30 foot row here, but I went ahead and planted them all. Put my seeds about 18 inches apart. So, there's one seed there, another one right there.

[00:12:08]18 in apart along the whole row. We'll thin them out to probably six or seven plants. Maybe only five plants. Once they get up and going, we don't need 20 plants for this 30ft row. That's way too many. We'll thin them out once they germinate. take the better looking ones and roll with those. So now all I need to do is take my rake, cover up these seeds, tamp them down a little bit, get some good seed to soil contact before we get this rain tomorrow. Now, one other big difference between summer squash and winter squash that I should have mentioned earlier is your harvest time and your harvest frequency. So with summer squash, a lot of times you can start picking those 40 days after planting, definitely 50 days after planting. They don't take very long to start producing. With these winter squash varieties, you're going to need a good 100 days there. So, if you live up north where you have limited summer, take that into account. You're going to need 100 days of frostfree weather to get a decent harvest. And with the summer squash, as you probably already know, you're having to harvest those every other day, sometimes every day if you're getting a lot of rain. With these winter squash, it's usually a one-time harvest, especially with the sea machada and the C maxima types. Now, some of the C pepo types like your acorn, your delicotta, or these spaghetti squash, we may have two or three harvests there.

[00:13:24]Some of them might not all mature quite at the same time, but we're not harvesting them near as frequently as we are the summer squash. So, hopefully explaining what a winter squash is and explaining those different types will help you determine which type you want to grow. For most of these, you are going to need a decent amount of space in your backyard garden. Although we hope this little raised bed experiment turns out with this more bush type spaghetti squash and we can get some good production there in a relatively small space. And as always, if you want to grow some of the same varieties we planted today, you can find seeds for those on our website at lazydogfarm.com.

[00:13:58]And if you want to see our simol pumpkin harvest from last year when we grew those plants in the dead heat of summer and had a really, really good harvest, watch this video right here. We show you just how many pumpkins we were able to harvest. Check that out.