Well, it’s getting a bit late in the season for this, but let’s talk about summer squash! Whether it’s zucchini, crookneck, scallops and more!
Squash are surprisingly thirsty plants. We were shocked when we tried to grow them in our sub irrigated containers, which allows us to see how much water a plant will drink over time. Even when they’re somewhat young, they can suck up more than a gallon of water a day. Even more if allowed! When mature, we observed that a single plant can drink 2 to 3 gallons in a day!
Similar to plants like cucumbers and tomatoes, squash are highly water dependent. The squash is “mostly” water and so the access to water can directly contribute to the size and health of your squash. One of the reasons we opt to grow our squash in ground is because of this. When allowed to put down deep roots, they can pull in lots of water rather deeply down in the soil. It’s very challenging to grow squash in containers.
The photo you see here is a good example of “what not to do” with summer squash. Summer squash are better harvested when they are still somewhat small. But, they can get massive if you ignore them (for not even all that long!) and they have great access to water. Squash that are allowed to get ginormous tend to be pithy and seedy, which makes them a bit less than attractive for use in your cooking. But, if this happens to you, don’t beat yourself up too much about it! It happens to the best of us!
The common answer to massive squash is, “Just make zucchini bread.” Ha! Yeah, this zucchini would probably make at least 30 loafs of zuch bread! That’s a lot (and we mean a LOT) of zucchini bread! And while zucchini bread is absolutely fantastic, there is a limit to how much you really want around!
As many of you know, summer squash can be quite productive! Like to the level where even your friends and family will say, “No thanks!” to your frequent and incessant offers to get rid of them. So, we’ll share a couple methods we use to make our squash harvests a bit more useful.
One of the main ways we like to preserve our summer squash is through pre-made squash casseroles that are then frozen. We also love making summer squash lasagna where the squash acts as the noodles in the lasagna, which can also be frozen. We have a lot of 8×8 pans for this purpose, it allows us to craft many pre-made meals that makes week night cooking a whole lot easier. These preservation methods tend to use up a lot more squash than, say, zucchini bread.
We do blanch and freeze a little bit of summer squash, but we’ve found that we don’t use a ton of it over the winter. The “ready made” meals above are much more useful to us. But, it is nice to have a few bags that we can throw into soups, stir fries or other winter meals that we might cook up.
Lastly, summer squash can last a couple of weeks (and sometimes even more) when stored whole in the fridge. A crisper drawer is best, but any kind of refrigeration is better than none. This can really help you spread out those squash meals, but it’s still easy to get overwhelmed when you get some productive plants!
If you’ve got some great ways to preserve squash, we’d love to hear them in the comments!
