Spaghetti Squash Mishaps

One of the vegetables we tried to grow this past summer was spaghetti squash – I particularly like spaghetti squash because it’s easy to make, yields a lot, and breaks into thin strands that are an excellent replacement for thin pasta or noodles. However, growing spaghetti squash was much more challenging…

One element to growing squash is that it needs to be pollinated in order for fruit to grow. Hopefully you have pollinators in your garden, such as bees or other bugs and critters, but in the case that you might not, you might have to pollinate yourself by physically brushing female flowers with the male flowers (you can also eat those flowers – squash blossoms). Some of our small squash fruits started rotting quickly so my partner started to pollinate regularly. Then, patience!

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Spaghetti squash is typically eaten as a winter squash, which is characterized by the hard outer skin; once you see the fruit, it can take months to ripen, significantly longer than summer squash. For most of the spaghetti squash plant life, it looked like it was not going to survive – the small pot that is falling apart, the weather being cloudy and foggy for weeks followed by smokey from the fires, and browning leaves with many critter made holes (See September 2020 ‘Spaghetti’ Squash Photo Above). We never figured out exactly what was going on, but we had a couple of spaghetti squash that we anxiously watched grow.

After a few months, we were able to harvest 2 squashes! One had strange longitudinal indents, similar to a summer squash or pumpkin, and the seeds were much smaller than the spaghetti squashes we usually make. The other one had dark striation patterns on the outside and was curved, similar to a zucchini. But we cut them in half, scooped out the seeds and threw it in the oven like we normally cook it. Our cooked squash had no strands like spaghetti squash, but more of a pumpkin or butternut squash texture and taste.

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In the end, we realized that maybe we had pollinated our spaghetti squash with a summer squash and zucchini…newly created hybrid vegetables! It did not turn out exactly right, but was fun to watch it grow. We ended up making both into a mashed squash and had some excellent meals with it.