Harvesting spaghetti squash

Remember how prolific and abundant the spaghetti squash was in the garden this summer?

Well, we've had some frosts, so the time had come (the walrus said?) to harvest it. Low nighttime temperatures had killed the plants, so there was no sense leaving the veggies languishing in the garden with no further source of nourishment.

The trouble was two-fold. One, we have nowhere really effective to store that much squash. (A root cellar is still a distant dream.) And two, about three-quarters of the squash was still unripe, thanks to the late "second wind" so many plants got a few weeks ago.

But issues or not, I started picking.

As I picked, I separated the ripe from the unripe. The ripe went into a wheelbarrow. Headcount: 23 squash.

I piled the unripe squash on one of the garden beds.

Headcount: 73

This means we harvested a total of 96 squash. It's a nice problem to have, but this much squash is still a problem.

A couple of squash were so small that they weren't worth counting.

And one had split, so that one will go in the compost pile (and with my luck, the seeds will grow as volunteers next year.)

We packed the ripe squash into crates...

...and stacked them in the well house. This is as close to a "root cellar" as we have. We have a small heater inside that kicks on whenever the inside temp dips toward freezing, but otherwise the space stays quite cool.

We piled the unripe spaghetti squash into every remaining crate we could locate. When we ran out of those, the remainder went into burlap sacks.

Apparently heat (as in, room temperatures) will help unripe spaghetti squash to ripen, slowly. So we hauled the crates inside and stacked them next to the ripening tomatoes.

We're unlikely to be able to eat this much spaghetti squash before it goes bad, so as the unripe squash  ripens, we'll be handing it out to friends and neighbors. And next year, I'll dial back how much I plant.

Another autumn chore, done.