ABOUT SQUASH

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Anthracnose is a soilborne fungus causing hollow, water-soaked spots on the leaves of summer squash—spots that eventually grow large and brown. To prevent the disease, practice crop rotation, avoiding areas where squash or other cucurbits, such as cucumbers, pumpkins and melons, have been planted.

How to Harvest and Store

Healthy summer squash will continue to set buds for quite a while as long as you pick each fruit before it matures; that is, just after its blossom drops off. However, if you miss even one squash, the entire plant will soon stop producing, so pick the vines regularly, harvesting zucchini and crookneck varieties at a tender six to eight inches long and the rounder types at four to eight inches in diameter. Your fingernail should easily penetrate the squash's skin; if it doesn't, you've left it on the vine too long.

Winter squash, on the other hand, if not allowed to mature, will taste bland and watery and won't store well. Pick them when the plants die back or just before the first frost when the shells are hard. (Though light frosts can enhance the fruits' flavor by changing some of their starch to sugar, exposure to frost injures their keeping quality.) Harvest during a dry spell, cutting the fruit from the vine with a sharp, clean knife, leaving three to four inches of stem. (If you pull the stem off, the whole fruit will most likely rot from that end. Should a stem break off accidentally, then it's best to use that squash as soon as possible.) Be sure to wipe your knife between cuttings to avoid spreading disease to still-ripening fruits. Also, handle your harvest gently, as squash bruise easily and bruised fruit won't keep—and, finally, don't wash the fruit you plan to store.

If possible, cure your winter-keepers in the sun until the stems shrivel and turn a gray color, then store them in a cool (45° to 50°F) and dry (60 to 70% humidity) place, where they should keep for up to five months. (Acorn squash need a slightly moister and cooler storage area.)

To can summer squash, just slice the cleaned, tender fruits into one-half-inch-thick pieces, pack them into canning jars, cover the contents with boiling water, seal the jars, and process them in a pressure tanner at 10 pounds of pressure—25 minutes for pints and 30 minutes for quarts.

For freezing, wash the squash and slice them into one-half-inch pieces, blanch these in boiling water for three minutes, then cool, drain, pack and freeze them. Summer squash can also be dried, pickled or turned into a delicious relish.

A leaf canopywill conserve moisture and repress weeds.

American Ratatouille

Because of the current preference for crisper, more nutritious vegetables, we've cut down the cooking time on this variation of an old favorite from southern France.

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