All About Growing Spaghetti Squash

good morning this is Brooke trot homestead and we are having a spring clean a in North East Texas I wanted to talk about our spaghetti squash today [Music] when I started growing spaghetti squash I knew nothing and I've seen a lot of videos on YouTube and I still didn't get exactly what I wanted to get from it so I wanted to help you guys out and do a video that kind of puts it simple and straight and makes it easy so what I did was our compost bin over here was full of just regular compost veggie scraps some grasses from cutting the grass and whatever else you put in compost I made two piles I made one over here and I made one over here and the main reason I used that it wasn't even all the way broken down was because I wanted to empty it so I can get started on a new pile so I figured hey why not let's try and the spaghetti squash I put three seeds I believe in this one in three season this one I waited until I got two strong plants so I had two here and two here that I left and they began to grow um I don't know where you live but here we have two bugs that love squash and love cucumbers so there's a cucumber beetle and then there's the squash vine borer and I had to deal with both of them with all four plants but thankfully it's still surviving and some tips the way we did that was I picked I came up here every morning I hand pollinated the female to the male flowers I like to hand pollinate my squash to make sure that I'm getting the best production I can I picked off the squash vine borer eggs off of the stem I sprayed neem oil make sure it's a cold-pressed organic neem oil because not all of them being sold are the proper ones I also for the cucumber beetles I kind of just took them flower and I squish to do it sounds gross but when you're trying to save your squash you'll do anything so if you can look down here we've have already picked I think for squash this one is obviously not ready what you're looking for in spaghetti squash is for it to be completely yellow more like a dark yellow and you want the stem right here of the squash to be brown this is obviously still green and over here you can see a small one so you want the stem to be branding you want the squash to be yellow but the way I pick my spaghetti squash I don't necessarily grow spaghetti squash to do the spaghetti noodle thing my family's not huge on the whole pasta thing so what I do is we like stir fries we like soups and stews and different things like that so I picked them as soon as they turn yellow a nice little pale yellow and the stem is still a little bit green I picked them I put them inside and let them sit for about three days and then I cut them out take the seeds out and I cook them I cook them like I would a yellow squash they are still edible in this green state it's just harder to cut through and you're gonna have to cook it a little longer that's why I wait until they're yellow you want the spaghetti squash cut in half you know peel the noodles when you bake it you have to wait and let it sit let the stem get Brown and let it get completely yellow but if you don't they are still completely edible green and if it's the end of your growing growing season and you have six spaghetti squash still on the vine that are not yellow that's okay you can cook them they are edible you will not get SiC you just won't be able to harden them off the way you would if you waited until the stem was brown that's another thing the shelf-life of the spaghetti squash does not last through the winter it does not last long if you don't wait until it's fully ripe so if you pick it green you're gonna have to eat it within the month or so you can't wait until it hardens off another thing I wanted to talk about is the vines okay so let's say a vine borer takes over your vine this vine is a work of the vine borer see how it's nasty see that this stuff coming out okay so this one is way too far gone but if I would have caught it earlier what I would have done was I would have gone to one of these right here I would have cut this off so this is just gonna be another runner and I will very right here I will bury it in a compost manure mixture or I even know people who do just plain dirt mud and then just put it right on here what this is gonna do this is gonna let your vinyl grow roots and once it grows roots this this system is will be okay so this all dies off you will still have this system here that is still healthy because it's surviving through the roots you just created and before it got cut the vine borers got my plants over here this was all covered but the vine borer got it so what I ended up doing was just a bunch of root systems throughout the plant and honestly it saved my plant and I still have things growing so I highly recommend looking into that I do know people who will cut the vine open take the borer out and then add dirt to it you can do that too but I just preferred to just cut the vine I don't I'm not the type of person that's good I just break it open and get bugs out it's just too much for me so I just buried it cut a vine and buried it right now I'm going to talk about trellising as you can see I did not trellis my squash I attempted to do a little half job so you see this one here and you see this year and I edit this here it did what it was supposed to do but obviously not enough next year what we're planning on doing is continuing the mound system that I got going on but we may just do two T posts a cattle panel cattle panel on top and then another two T posts so that when I grow my squash they'll climb up one side lay out the top and then go down the other side not only is it a space saver but you don't have to worry too much about disease bugs and having to deal with your squash sitting on the ground because we have a lot of mulch so we don't have to worry about mushy signs of squash and bolding too much but even on the mulch if it gets too wet in one certain area and your squash sits there the odds would be getting mushy or bugs being able to burrow through it are pretty high so if you have the space to let everything crawl out and have a good mulch I highly recommend doing that if that's what you want but if you don't have this space if you don't want to have to worry about checking your squash every single day making sure or even if you go to my squash down there I have a flag stone under it all of my squash have flagstone under it right now just to make sure because it's been rainy the last three days just to make sure that they don't get mushy so highly recommend the trellis if that's your thing if you want to avoid all the little situation or highly recommend letting it crawl out if you have the space if you have the mulch it's really up to you I hope this video was helpful like I said squash are very heavy feeders just like pumpkins and watermelons those things like that so make sure you're doing your top dressing of compost compost tea fish fertilizer whatever you have on hands bone meal just top dress it make sure that your squash are being fed because if you're not feeding your squash they're not going to taste good and they're not going to be fully developed so thank you so much for watching I hope I helped you have a great day god bless you

Channel: Jesus Loving Homesteader

Views: 25,908

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Id: V6_tUsjj82c

Length: 9min 2sec (542 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 06 2020