When and How to Harvest Spaghetti Squash

[Music] hey guys rick stone here from our sony acres welcome to our youtube channel today i'm going to be teaching you how to harvest spaghetti squash super excited about this video we've got a ton of spaghetti squash this year we planted two big hills and i bet you we have two dozen spaghetti squash out in the garden this year so i'm excited to do this video teach you guys when and how to harvest spaghetti squash okay before we get started though please make sure you subscribe to my youtube channel click that notification bell so you notice every time i release new videos and also if you would do me a favor go over and follow us on instagram we're getting a pretty good following over there it's a lot of fun because i'm able to go out and do some things in the stories and stuff like that and so i would love to have you come follow us on instagram as well and so there's a link down in the description that you can click on to do that okay so before i'm actually going to take you and we're going to do some harvesting talk about curing and things like that but before we do that i wanted to give you a couple of caveats okay first and foremost one of the things that you really want to try to do is leave these guys in the garden for as long as you possibly can so the the longer they're in the garden the more mature they're going to be and the longer they're going to last in storage so we want to make sure that we get these guys nice and hard and the skin super solid that's what's going to make them last for a long long time and you know we've got like i say a couple of dozen squash this year it's going to take a while for us to eat those up so we want to leave them in the garden as long as you possibly can now if you want to just eat one fresh like this one we're going to have for dinner tonight then what i'm going to teach you is is a great way to know that they're they're ready to harvest and you can eat them fresh but the longer you can leave them in the garden the better they're going to be in storage so make sure that you you leave them just as long as you can but here's the caveat you don't want them to get frozen okay so they're going to be maturing you know it's middle of september right now for us we've got maybe a couple of weeks left until our first frost and you the thing that you don't want to have happen is you don't want them to get frozen you don't want them to freeze out in the garden because that is really going to dramatically affect how long they're going to last in storage so leave them in the garden as long as you possibly can if you're ready to eat one great go ahead and eat them but the ones that you want to store you want to leave and let them mature for as long as you can in the garden before you harvest them okay so now let's go and we'll talk about actually harvesting these yummy spaghetti squash all right so let's talk about when we are going to actually be harvesting our spaghetti squash and technically this these rules kind of apply to any of the winter squashes so your butternut squashes banana squash all you know the hubbard squashes any of those are going to be pretty similar to this in your rules for when you're going to harvest okay so the first thing you want to do is you want to look at your seed packet and figure out what your days to maturity are most spaghetti squash are going to mature somewhere between 90 to 110 days but it varies based on your variety so you definitely want to check that out first because you know if if they're 110 day squash don't even worry about it until we get to 110 days they're going to be fine and that's about four months and so they're going to be you know in the garden for a long long time okay now none of them are going to mature at the same time if you look at our patch we've got some that are right ready to to harvest some that will be ready in a week or so and we've got several that i'm a little bit worried might not even make it before the first frost so you're going to have kind of a wide variety you know because you're going to have flowers that have come all through the season so let's talk about the rules the first thing that is really going to give you a clue that your spaghetti squash is ready to harvest is there's going to be a dramatic color change okay so let's come down here and take a look at the squash so first off um this one totally not ready this is what they're going to look like most of the seasons so see how it's still green almost white it's it's got visible stripes to it definitely not even close okay these are right ready to go so if you look at these uh both of these are pretty close this one more so than this one see how this one still has some striping that you can see and this one the striping is pretty much gone okay so that's a good sign now i'm gonna have the cameraman come up here and we're gonna look really quick at this one over here see how we've got we're starting to get color in these but not quite yet okay so those are not ready to go but getting pretty close okay so now let's talk about the thumbnail test because this is really kind of the key okay so here's the thumbnail test so is what you're gonna do is you're gonna take your nail and you're gonna try and press it into the skin of the squash and if the squash is ready to harvest your thumbnail is barely going to leave an impression so come up here really close and if you look i'm just poking and nothing's happening okay the skin has gotten really hard and you can see that it's not my thumbnail's not going in now let's just back off and let's look at this one which is not ready if i put my thumbnail in it i don't know if you guys can see that see what happens see how much softer it is so you know that your squash is ready when it's super super hard like that the other thing is is sometimes the squash will have a little bit of glossiness to it and that glossiness will also go away so if you look these are kind of getting dull in color and that that glossiness will fade so this guy is right ready to harvest so here's what we're going to do first off you want to be using a good sharp pair of pruners or a knife or something like that so when we actually cut these off we want to leave about three or four inches of this stem here and this one is a great example of that we're just going to go ahead and cut this right here and we want to leave that stem on because that will help with storage so it's going to help it store longer and stay more stable for a longer time if we leave that on there so that's it it's that simple to harvest them so really quick then let's talk about storage so the next thing that you want to do after you've harvested these is you're going to want to take all the ones that are ripe and that you've harvested inside somewhere like a garage or something like that maybe a covered porch or patio and you want to let them cure in hopefully 80 to 85 degree weather for 10 to 14 days you're just going to let them sit there and they're going to cure and that's going to kind of finish off the process and get them ready for storage to store them after they've cured for that 10 to 14 days we want to put them in someplace as cool as we can possibly get it if you can get it to about 50 to 55 degrees that's ideal so we're looking for a root cellar a cool spot in your basement or a cool spot in a garage or something like that but we also don't want them to freeze okay so we don't want it to get much below that 50 degree mark so you kind of that's the the place where they're going to last the longest and sometimes people will get these squash to last all winter long and you know into next summer if you can store them properly but you've got to hit that sweet spot of 50 to 55 degrees okay the one other rule that you want to make sure that you do when you're storing them is you don't stack them on top of each other so they need to be stored side by side don't stack them on top of each other because if one of them happens to go bad it's going to spread and so you want to make sure that they're they're not stacked on top of each other so that is harvesting and curing okay guys so hopefully you enjoyed that we harvested a couple of these guys today and we're going to use those to eat over the next few days but like i said we have just a ton left in the garden and i'm going to try and leave those guys in as long as i possibly can again remembering not to let them freeze before you do you know before they get harvested um so that's all i have for you hopefully you enjoyed this video if you liked it please give it a thumbs up make sure that you subscribe to my youtube channel go over and follow us on instagram as well there's a link down in the description also i would love to have you come join us in the gardening academy the gardening academy is our monthly membership service where i provide several different pieces of content every month that are private and specific for our members we do a mini course every month we have a live q a session several other things that we do throughout the month and it's just an awesome way for you to learn how to garden and it's fall moving into the winter is a great time for you to be able to spend some time getting some better gardening skills by learning in the gardening academy so i would love to have you come and join us there's a link down in the description click on that and you can come over and join us in the gardening academy this winter would be a great time to have you come and join so that you can become a better gardener over the winter for next year's garden okay that my friends is all i have for this week we'll see you next week everybody have a great week happy gardening

Channel: ourstoneyacres

Views: 57,006

Keywords: Spaghetti squash, how to harvest spaghetti squash, harvesting squash, vegetable gardening, organic gardening

Id: T0Mg5DV0T7o

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 18 2021