We love it also and I would be happy to just grow it and cure it like winter squash even it if only lasted a few months, but I haven't had much luck growing it. It is a cucurbita pepo and the bugs love it and I don't use pesticides in my garden. I hope your seeds are not hybrid seeds or you might not get what you are expecting. Unless you have a lot of space, you might want to buy seeds.

I've heard of at least two occasions that someone grew from seed taken from store bought spaghetti squash. Both times it grew true. Still, I bet it is sometimes grown near other things like zucchini or acorn squash, and it would readily cross.

We love it too! But I have been discouraged, as the last three or four times I've tried to grow it, the borers have annihilated it. The only chance I think I'd have would be with row cover, to protect it while young (from squash bugs) and/or getting it in as early as possible, so it has some chance before the borers get going full steam.

George
Tahlequah, OK

We had squash bugs last year, so should we avoid planting them next year? We had lovely 7 feet tall ( I kid you not!) zuchinni and yellows, looked marvelous, then squahs bugs arrived. It was awful, when I removed the plants there were hundreds of them.

I heard it readily crosses too. Does that mean it will make an edible fruit, and what would it be called? It would cross with cucumbers, too, right? I find that fascinating. Would the result be a gourd, or?

I read it takes a long time to mature so the squash bugs would probably get it. I've had them whether I spray or not. Hate those things.

After you freeze it and then thaw it and eat it, the flavor itself doesn't really change, but the texture does. Frozen squash that has been thawed is more watery and a little mushy (depends on how you cook it) in comparison to fresh squash.

Saved seed, as others have noted, may or may not give you exactly the same squash you had. If the spaghetti squash was an open-pollinated variety that didn't cross-pollinate with another squash in the same species (C. pepo, so that would include zucchini, scallop, acorn, crookneck, straightneck, etc.), then you might get a harvest of squash just like the one from which you saved seeds. However, if your original squash came from a hybrid variety, you might or might not get something similar---it would be just the luck of the draw depending on how the genes sorted. Since hybrids are creating by crossing two (or more) parents lines, you don't know how genes will resort when they are coming from seed created by plants that are children of the original cross.

Squash bugs are pretty much a perpetual problem once they find your garden, as are squash vine borers. However, every now and then, you get a year where one or the other, or even both, just don't show up. I think my last year like that was 2011 or 2012. You have to aggressively attack the squash bugs every year, using every organic method at your disposal. It is especially important to find them all and kill them all every autumn, and to dispose of all squash plant debris (via burning it or bagging it up and having it hauled away as trash) so it will not serve as an overwintering location for the squash bugs. Skipping planting squash one year might help or it might not. If someone near you is growing squash, they'll be over in their garden this year, and then come back to yours the next year you plant squash.

Squash vine borers show up for 2 and sometimes 3 generations a year in our climate. Each generation seems to last about 6 weeks. I believe a member of this forum who lives down here in southern Oklahoma may have had 4 generations this year, which is very rare. (One generation is one too many, but we cannot do anything about that.....). The best hope of beating them is to grow only squash from the C. moschata species (or some of the cushaws from C. argyrosperma) as they have dense stems (other squash have hollow ones which allow the squash vine borers to bore through them) which prevent the borers from tunneling through them. It also helps if you can move the squash around within the garden, rotating it from one location to another each year, which at least makes the overwintering squash vine borers and squash bugs have to search harder to find your plants.

Early plantings sometimes have time to get big and produce a harvest before squash bugs or squash vine borers show up....and sometimes they don't.

Growing under floating row cover or in isolation cages helps a great deal, but generally requires you to hand-pollinate your squash blooms daily as the covers prevent pollinators from reaching the flowers.

The Cucurbita family is large and very diverse. The different members of the cucurbita family can cross with other cucurbitas, but only with the ones that are in their same genus and species. So, cucumbers, which are Cucumis sativus, can cross with other cucumbers that also are C. sativus, but they wouldn't cross with any of the squash (which are from a different genus (Cucurbia) and any one of several different species, including C. pepo, C. agryrosperma, C. maxima, and C. moschata) or with the melons that are in the Cucumis melo family (true cantaloupes, muskmelons, honeydew, Armenian cucumbers, vine peaches or Asian pickling melons) or with watermelons that are Citrullus lunatas, even though they all are in the Cucurbitaceae family. Watermelons cross with other watermelons, but they don't cross with squash, melons or gourds.

Within the Cucurbita family, maximas will only cross with other maximas and pepos with other pepos, etc., for the most part although I won't say it cannot happen or never will happen because I think it can be done at least with some things in lab conditions.

If you want to save seed in the future, there are ways to ensure that open-pollinated varieties produce true from seed, and this can include isolating the blossoms by bagging, caging or using floating row cover and hand-pollinating it yourself to prevent insect- or wind-aided pollination. (That's a general comment on saving seed in general, not one specific to squash.) With each type of seed you want to save, you have to know how it pollinates to know how to control the pollination or even if you need to try to control it.) You also can isolate by distance, although the generally recognized isolation distance can be hard to achieve if you aren't on acreage, or widely isolated from farm fields or other gardeners.

While squash bugs are a pretty consistent problem almost statewide, I don't think I had squash vine borers for our first 7 or 8 years here, and it was wonderful. I grew up to 30 varieties of squash a year and really loved it. I knew one day the SVBs would find us, and once they did, I now mostly restrict myself to growing only squash from the C. moschata family. Every now and then I'll grow one of the cushaw varieties, or maybe one C. pepo or C. maxima variety, but most years they aren't worth the time it takes because the SVBs will hit them before the squash can mature. While most C. moschata varieties are winter squash varieties, any of them can be harvested a short while (just a couple of days) after the flowers are fertilized for use as a summer squash while young and tender. There also is a summer squash that is C. moschata. It is an Oriental variety known as an avocado squash. I find it easier to grow it than to worry and fret about the squash bugs and squash vine borers getting my C. pepo, C. maxima or C. agyrosperma plants. One year I waited until my C. moschata vines were big and running all over the place and then planted an ornamental pumpkin that was C. pepo variety "Goosebumps", right in the middle of them and the squash bugs and squash vine borers didn't find it until it already had produced a couple of mature pumpkins for Halloween decorations. That is more the exception than the rule, though.

If money were no object, I'd build a high tunnel and cover it with mosquito netting or some other kind of netting like the pricey ProTek netting to exclude the squash bugs and squash vine borers so I could grow all the squash I want. However, since I live in the real world where a budget matters, I just focus on growing the types the squash bugs and squash vine borers generally cannot or do not kill. Or, I grow some C. pepos under summerweight floating row covers, but the wind here in OK can make that challenging since it likes to lift up those row covers (even when staked down to the ground) and carry them away on the wind.

Don't be afraid to try to grow whatever variety, species and genus of squash you like, but just be aware that with anything that is C. pepo or C. maxima, and most of the C. agyrospermas, you will have to take extraordinary action to keep the squash bugs and squash vine borers from killing the plants. Squash bugs actually harm them by spreading disease, so choosing the most disease-tolerant varieties you can find also helps.
Dawn

If one only grows for the fruit, to eat, then crossing really doesn't matter. When one gets an off type fruit, that means the crossing occurred in the previous generation.

If pure seed is desired, then it is worth purchasing pure seed, as that will most likely ensure a good start, possibly saving a year in the process. Here's a link to a guide on hand pollination of squash. It isn't hard to do.

George

Here is a link that might be useful: Guide for Hand Pollination of Squash

George, I'm glad you linked that. I thought I had saved it in my Favorites on my computer, but I couldn't find it last night.

Dawn

My system thinks the file is damaged and won't open it, but I have read this before, so maybe I already have it.

Amy,

Hmmm. It opened fine for me, though it took a minute.

As George's personal secretary, it is my duty to link this "how to" at least twice a year, so I'll link the GW version below. This is the first one I remember him posting, way back in 2008. (Or, maybe I saw it before that, but my aging brain cells just cannot go any further back than 2008.)

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: MacMex's

Thank you Dawn! That is the one I had seen, but I don't know where I saved it. I have saved it now. My husband informed me he wants zuchinni and yellow squash next year. I guess watching me chase SVBs around with hairspray last summer didn't make much of an impression. My plan is bush varieties, covered with something and hand polinated. We will see.

I love you guys!

I have a very limited space for gardening, tiny tiny yard. I will forgo planting squash for a few years, as I don't know if I had borers or not. The bugs I found looked sort of like shield bugs, and they were in the hundreds under the leaves on the bare ground, as well as the root system. The vines appeared to be rotting off at the base. I cut several stems off just to be able to remove the plants, and did not see any boring, however they may have been unaffected. The stems that were affected by something were so slimy and rotten I didn't feel like looking closer.

Also, since the texture change and wateryness is something I would find undesirable, will abandon my plan of growing and freezing loads.

I have to be gluten free, so when I tasted this squash I started getting all sorts of ideas.

I thank you for your help and extensive explanations about pollination and varieties. I have learned so much here.

Your stem damage sounds like vine borers. They are evil. The others sound like squash bugs, also evil. My theory is that people with healthy soil and room for c. Moschata varieties that can send down roots at leaf nodes for further support have good luck with squash. My moschatas survived the borers, but the squash bugs finally did them in. I researched all I could for avoiding these pests, but they found me, and tortured me anyway. Organic methods of dealing with these pests are kind of labor intennsive for an old woman like me. And my understanding is pesticides aren"t real effective on them either.

They have a tool that will make spaghetti like strings from other veggies, which might be cheaper than spaghetti squash.

Here is a link that might be useful: veggie twister

Amy, You're welcome.

There's a handful of summer squash/zucchini varieties, and maybe even smaller winter squash varieties, developed to be grown in greenhouses that do not require pollination. I'll try to find out the names and come back here and link them. While growing squash under floating row covers or in isolation cages (wood frames covered by window screen material) does work, a smart squash bug or SVB can sneak into the planting while you have the cover lifted up in order to hand-pollinate, so you still can have issues with them. I have had stupid squash bugs fly onto my arm or shirt while I am hand-pollinating, which makes them easy to see and kill, but I know some sneak into the plants while I have the row cover pulled back to hand-pollinate.

Polyd,

Sadly, if you live and garden in Oklahoma, you will have to deal with squash bugs and squash vine borers 4 years out of 5 (or 5 out of 5) from now until the end of time. Normally squash bugs will spread diseases that then show up on your foliage, and squash vine borers tunnel through the vines, causing them to rot as you described. Since both are damaging in their own way, we have to fight both of them. I think SVBs are a bigger risk to the plants, but squash bugs can spread enough disease to kill plants too.

I'm going to link for you my favorite document that addresses organic methods you can use to combat them. In order to achieve and maintain control, you need to start early and then consistently do whatever it takes to keep them under control. Lots of folks have great success controlling both with organic methods until they go out of town on vacation for a week or two and return to find the pests have been having a convention in their garden while they were away from home. Another way around them is to keep sowing new seeds so you always have some newer, younger plants coming along to replace the older ones. I try to sow new seeds monthly, and I sow them as far away as I can from the existing ones so that it takes a while for the pests to find them. I have 4 separate fenced garden plots, some of them separated from the others by 200-300', though, and even with that distance, the bugs find new plantings pretty quickly.

One factor that makes gaining the upper hand so hard is that they are out there in our gardens 24/7 growing, multiplying and damaging our plants whereas we are in the garden for a much briefer period of time and we actually have others things to do that do not involve spending 100% of our gardening time trying to find and kill the squash bugs and squash vine borers.

With careful scouting, daily, and by making every effort to control them, daily, you can keep them at bay somewhat but in the long run they almost always win since we gardeners just can't be out there every minute of every day. I'm really good about hand-picking them (wearing throwaway nitrile or latex medical gloves) and dropping them into soapy water to drown in the earlier part of the garden year. The more you can find them and destroy them (including finding and destroying eggs before they hatch) early in the season, generally the fewer you'll have to deal with throughout the summer. If you can knock back their numbers to almost nothing early in the year, you will find them easier to almost control than if you wait until you have dozens, or hundreds, of squash bugs.

Later in the summer, as I get increasingly busier with garden maintenance, harvesting and canning, I tend to lose control of the squash bugs because I just don't have time to deal with them. That's one reason I grow so many moschatas. (Well, and throw in the fact that C. moschata squash are very tasty!)

With squash vine borers, your only real hope is to keep a flyswatter handy and kill every SVB moth you see, preferably before they get a chance to lay eggs on the plants. Some people have success with spraying the plants with Surround WP, a form of kaolin clay. I have some in my shed, and every year I say to myself, "This is the year I am going to spray my plants" and then I never get around to it. I hate spraying anything in my garden, even organic stuff, so if I can find a way to avoid doing it, I do. So far, my way to avoid spraying it is to just harvest all the summer squash I can before the bugs get to the plants, and to grow C. moschata for winter squash.

What works best for me is merely to beat them (for a while) with early plantings. I will start squash seeds in 20-oz. plastic Solo cups in my greenhouse, moving them out to the garden as soon as they have one true leaf. If the nights are still cold, I use a heavier form of floating row cover that protects them from frost. Often, if I can get the squash plants into the ground fairly early, they're already producing a harvest before I ever see the first squash bug.

As Amy mentioned, the squash pests that plague us have developed a tolerance of or a resistance to many common pesticides, so even if a person is willing to use those pesticides, they may not work.

I think that you would like the flavor of the C. moschata types of winter squash almost as much as you liked the summer squash. They are very tasty. I'll list a few of the C. moschata types for you: Seminole pumpkin, Seminole pumpkin--large form, Long Island Cheese Pumpkin, Old Timey Cornfield Pumpkin, Musquee de Provence, Lunga di Napoli, Waltham Butternut (and all butternuts, including Honey Nut), Tonda Padana, Trombocino, Dickenson Pumpkin, Tahitian Melon and Tan Cheese Pumpkin. There's several great sources for seeds of the above, including Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Sandhill Preservation Center and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

I wouldn't give up on the idea of growing spaghetti squash. You just have to find a way to protect the plants. Putting simple hoops over your beds to form low tunnels is one way. You can use a somewhat heavier weight of row cover in the early weeks to help keep the young plants both warmer and protected from pests, but as the real summer heat arrives, you'd need to switch to a lightweight row cover intended for use in summer conditions. I put low tunnels over most of my raised beds in late winter and early spring in order to protect the plants from late freezing temperatures and hail stones. We have a really tough gardening climate here in spring with some really wild temperature swings and lots of severe weather, so using some simple low tunnels can be a really effective way to protect your plants from all kinds of hazards.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Squash Pests and Organic Control Methods