Don't plant zuchetta with it, you will never be able to step a foot outside your house!

That's great it gave you such a great reward!

Lisa

Leava,

What a wonderful harvest those butternuts gave you and Jeff. They store very well too so y'all will be able to enjoy them for a long time.

Your experience with the plants that grew in the compost pile emphasizes just out how much we all can improve our soil just by adding compost every year. In gardening, it all starts with the soil, and compost-enriched soil produces high yields even in tough weather. After 14 years of adding compost to the veggie garden beds every year, the soil we have now bears very little resemblance to the dense red clay we started out with in the beginning.

My experience with butternut is that the vines do run rampantly everywhere and the vines are very productive. I only planted a couple of butternut squash plants, a couple of Seminole pumpkins, and 1 Tahitian Melon, which actually is a winter squash (not a melon) that is similar to zuchetta, which normally is used as a summer squash. These vines took over every available inch of space, and beyond. All of them ran all over the ground, climbing trellises, fences, tomato cages, etc. and some of them escaped from the north side of the garden and grew out into the adjacent woodland. All three of these are on my list of favorite winter squash to plant because they pretty much won't die until a hard freeze gets them, and you cannot kill them. They laugh at squash vine borers, and while I have seen squash bugs near them, the squash bugs do not harm them enough to kill them or even enough to slow them down or hurt their productivity.

If these particular varieties of squash are grown in poor soil, they still produce, but the better the soil, the better they produce. I can imagine that plants grown in a compost pile would produce huge harvests as yours did.

What the butternut, Seminole and zuchetta/trombocino types have in common is that they all are Cucurbita moschata, and moschatas have solid vines instead of hollow ones, so the squash vine borers cannot easily bore their way into and through the stems as they can with other types of cucurbits that are C. pepo, C. agyrosperma and C. maxima.

I've taken out my Tahitian Melon and Butternut plants in order to use those areas for the fall/winter garden, but the Seminole vine is still going strong, still flowering and setting new fruit that are not going to be able to mature before frost kills the plants. These two plants cover about 400 square feet and I didn't even water them in the worst of the summer heat/drought. Before I took out the butternut plants and the Tahitian Melon plants, they covered about the same amount of space that the Seminole does. The Seminole plants wilted when I stopped watering but they didn't die. When it rained in August they perked up and resumed their rampant growth. The other day I thought about taking out the Seminole plants and putting a winter cover crop in that area, but all the little flying insects love the blooms so I left it alone. Also, ever since late August I've noticed that the songbirds sit on the winter squash trellis and catch grasshoppers that flock to the plants' leaves, so I don't want to disrupt the birds' good bug-catching work.

Lisa, When I first grew zuchetta about 20 years ago in Texas, I didn't consider the fact that its name is Zuchetta rampicante and didn't give it nearly enough space. That's a mistake I haven't made since then. It is such a huge garden monster, but in a good way. I wouldn't recommend it for Square Foot Gardening though!

Dawn

Lisa and Dawn,funny re the zuchetta,sharon had already messaged me about it.........i forgot to mention i took the little seedlings out of worm bin and transplanted.maybe the compost got them off to a superb start.dawn i thank you for the info on the squashes,i keep trying to think how to grow here and especially how to grow veggies that keep in the root cellar,i think our food security in US is so iffy.i am reading a book about midwives in the ozarks and there is some info on their food systems,i collect and read pioneer books and we have gotten so far away from the rhythm of eating from a garden.i have to admit trying to do that i realized how deeply rooted my addictions to prepared foods is.we make our own bread, i cook from scratch most of the time,but i flat got tired of eating the veggies we had coming in week after week.this year i did better with variety and small amounts of plants but i need more variety still.of course with our weather i tend to focus on planting what i think has the best odds of producing.i did make bread and butter pickles with our pattypan which did great and peeps liked that.i really need to buy a good canner and get over my terror of using one and work on canning the surplus.

Leava, You may be surprised at how much you can do with a water bath canner, which is really just a deep pot with a lid and a rack in the bottom. I did a lot of food this year and didn't use my pressure canner at all. Take small steps.

Leave,that is lot of butternut squash and ahaha you will have lof of rooms for inventing new recipes for this Thanksgiving!

As we all know the stories of zuchetta for Seedmama and followers, no buternut with leave... I have had same issue with edible luffa (ridge gourd), we were harvesting at least 10 per day in peak for about a month, all my friends, colleagues, neighbours are fed with it.