YORKTON - The next meeting of the Yorkton and District Horticultural Society will be held on Wednesday, Oct. 19, at the Godfrey Dean, ground floor meeting room. Please note the change of location for this occasion only! The October meeting is a ‘members only’ meeting, where we’ll be taking care of business like collecting memberships for the year ahead, as well as other hort business. If you have any questions about this meeting, please call Liz at (306) 782-2830.
Congratulations to Glen and everyone who worked so hard with the Yorkton Gardener’s Market. It’s a huge commitment for the gardeners to be there each week over the summer with their lovely produce. Think of all the prep work that happens before they bring their harvest to market. Well done! They have all now earned a well-deserved rest till next year!
It’s the time of year when squash seems so perfect on our menus. What is your favourite kind? I love all kinds of squash; one of my favourites would be spaghetti squash. I have fond memories of Mom putting spaghetti squash to bake in the oven, so that it would be ready when we came in at dusk after the last of the day’s gardening tasks. She cut it in half lengthways, took out the seeds, then dotted the squash with yummy slices of butter and lots of black pepper. It smelled so delicious as it cooked and tasted even better!
Another favourite is the butternut squash, that delicious-looking club-shaped squash. The flesh is very dense in this one, a lovely orange, and so tasty baked in the oven or used in soups.
Do you see a pattern with these two choices? They are both “winter squashes”. What doe that mean?
Winter squashes are part of the Cucurbita family, and we know them by their appearance. This is the squash family that has the bumpy Hubbards; the football-shaped spaghetti squash; the very pretty green-striped delicata, the exotic kabocha, the unique-shaped butternuts, our beloved pumpkins, and the cute little acorn squashes. But most of all, this covers the varieties of squash that have a tough skin, not soft like the zucchini, but a hard and robust skin that we can’t pierce with a fingernail. These are the ‘keepers’, the squash that will last a long time when we bring them in for the winter.
What a satisfying task it is to bring in these beauties, knowing that we can enjoy them on a cold winter day! They will store best in a dry, dark, and cool spot in the basement. And guess what, we can easily freeze raw squash like butternut squash. Just peel it, cut it into cubes, then spread the cubes onto a cookie sheet and freeze them. Once frozen, toss them into a bag and they’re ready to use anytime! And we don’t have to thaw them out before use: they’re ready to go into soups or chili!
And not only does the beautiful squash look like a package of sunshine on a winter day, but it is full of what kind of vitamin, class? Vitamin A and C of course, because that amazing color has lots of great antioxidants.
So not only should we watch for interesting squash in the produce aisle at this time of year, but we can also mark it down in our garden notebooks under the heading of “things to plant in 2023”. You can bet it won’t be long till we start getting our seed catalogues for next year! Visit the hort society at www.yorktonhort.ca and see what’s happening. Thank you to our friends at YTW for their fine work. Enjoy your late-fall gardening tasks and have a great week!
