Thursday 19 September 2019

Harvesting "Crown Prince" squashes

Today I deemed it the right moment to harvest my crop of "Crown Prince" squashes. Their parent plants were dying down and there was no chance of the fruits growing any more. It was definitely time to cut them and leave them to cure in the sunshine before we progress to cold wet weather.


As you can see, I got a total of five fruits from my two plants. Not a huge crop, but considering the less than ideal site they had, I'm well pleased with this result.


The biggest of the five weighs 3.35kgs, the second biggest 3.28kgs and all five together come to 13.5kgs. This should keep the two of us supplied with soup material for several months!

You will notice that I have cut the squashes with a fair bit of stem, in the approved "T-shape" manner. Cutting with too little stem attached can lead to rotting of the fruit before it is cured.


The weather here at present is glorious - bright blue skies, sunshine and daytime temperatures in the low 20s - so the squashes should cure very nicely in my big coldframe, with the doors open.


At night-time the temperatures this week have dipped into single figures, so I'll try to remember to close the doors before dark!

Right, now to refresh my memory on recipes using squash...

4 comments:

  1. In regard to keeping Crown Prince we've found that chopping them up and freezing (no blanching or other cooking required) allows us to store excess that we don't use over the winter. Squash frozen from last year's harvest is still in excellent condition.

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  2. We’ll be harvesting Crown Prince this weekend. They haven’t done very well this year. I like to use them in tagine and pumpkin pie among other things

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  3. Thank you for this helpful overview - we have grown a crown prince from a seed in a piece we got from a local veg box scheme. It took a while to get going but is now marching across the lawn and growing up the fence trellis 10ft away! One big squash and several smaller ones coming, we just hope there is enough season left to grow the other ones out! It if planted next to a mixed bag of courgettes and squashes so who knows what the seeds will come out as next year - time to experiment!

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