Plan To Plant For Flavor and Nutrition
(Page 3 of 4)
January/February 1971
By Charles F. Jenkins
This squash is easy to grow. Its vines spread moderately and its fruit is comparable to a small watermelon in size. Preparation is easy. Boil or bake the squash whole and cut it into halves or quarters. Scrape seeds from the cavity and scratch at the meat with a kitchen fork. You'll be amazed to find that it shreds into uniform strands of "spaghetti" with a rich butter yellow tint that is most appetizing. Served with your favorite spaghetti sauce or with meat balls, this is an entree beyond compare, hardly distinguishable from the machine-extruded product. Stored in a dry place, spaghetti squash will last through the spring following harvest.
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You can save spaghetti squash seeds from the uncooked fruit. Clean and dry as instructed for the tomato seeds. Plant by making an indentation about the size of a soup bowl with one stroke of a hoe in prepared ground. Drop four to six seeds into the pit, cover, step on it, take one full stride down the row and make another hole. Space the rows three feet apart and you will have hills of plants approximately three feet by three feet.
There is a school of thought (which seems logical to me) that when you have need for pollination it is better to plant in blocks than in long rows. In this instance, a small planting of spaghetti squash may bear more abundantly if you arrange, say, nine hills in three rows of three.
Strawberries are one of the all-time favorite garden plants for both people who rent and people who own property. They are sturdy, easily moved, multiply rapidly via runners (which means—with nominal care—a strawberry bed is forever renewed) and, with little added effort, extra plants may be sold to recover the original investment. Strawberries are mouthwatering to eat too . . . sometimes.
When you dream of strawberries in the middle of winter, every serving from last spring was delicious. But were they? How many times did you look at an attractive dish of berries and—after tasting—wonder how berries so beautiful could be so ordinary? This is not always true nor need be. There are strawberries and strawberries.
At one of the annual Small Fruits Day exhibitions given by the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center at Wooster, Dr. Hill—who heads the small fruits department—extolled the several commercial advantages of a new large strawberry developed in New Jersey and another berry not yet released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They were compared in size, shipping quality and other attributes with the popular Robinson.
