Over the weekend I finally got the last of the fall harvest in the freezer. 2 pumpkins and one zucchetta rampicante that had been sitting on the counter since October. The pumpkins were tiny little pie pumpkins, but the zucchetta was huge! It took 2 roaster pans to bake that thing!
The pumpkins were from an experiment. There’s a hybrid variety that I love, so I’m trying to breed it back into an open-pollinated one. Homesteading guru Jackie Clay has done this successfully with tomato varieties, so I’m trying it with my pumpkins. Most of the ones from this last batch were missing one trait or another, but one of them was perfect, so I’m saving seeds from that one for the next round.
The zucchetta is actually an Italian zucchinni. It has a firm, meaty texture that I love, and is good enough to eat raw or cooked. Over the summer I’d read that this same variety makes a decent winter squash, so when one got buried in leaves until it was too big, I decided to let it finish ripening all the way. Besides, I wanted to save the seeds before I ran out of them.
My goodness that squash is sweet!!! Not “sweet as vegetables go”, but “who snuck 4 cups of sugar in the blender with it” sweet!!!! I was tempted to try getting sugar from it like you can with beets, but decided not to. We made pie with it and left out 1/3 of the sugar in the recipe, it still came out a bit too sugary! And we got 13 and 1/2 cups of squash puree from a single squash, that one is definately getting more space in my garden this spring!
Purple of Sicily and Sunset Cauliflower seedlings cranking, along with twelve varieties of sweet peppers...will be starting 150 varieties of tomatoes pretty soon...
How do you sugar...beets.