The Big One

The giant and siblings, September 2024

I had eight good sized squashes (and two small but still edible) this year.  One was damaged on the vine so got cooked right away;  the others are still curing in my living room.  We actually ate our last 2023 squash in July of 2024!  I saved seed from that one to plant in 2025, but I'm also planning on saving seed from that big orange squash too--which also came from my own saved seed of course.

As I mentioned in a previous post, my big squash had its two minutes of fame:  it went to my work (a school) for a "guess the weight" contest.  It's 15.2 kg!  The farthest left squash in the photo above is the next biggest (but unweighed as of yet) and a similar size to my biggest squashes last year.  All these grew from the seed of one squash I'd saved, and I got those three colors:  orange, dark green, light green.  I grow them at my allotment where the bees are free to pollinate with everyone else's squashes, and I suspect that last year I got some pollen from someone else's Atlantic Giant variety to get that prize orange one.

A colleague organized the contest on a whim, though she'd asked me initially to bring it in for her harvest display (I also brought in some beets with greens and purple podded French beans).  We had the weighing scales out for something else and I suddenly thought we could weigh my squash.  We were both amazed by its weight;  then she said, we should hold a contest!  She printed the slips of paper for all the kids (and adults) to write down their guesses and a box to put them in, and afterward we went through the box to find the three closest.  Those three got a toffee apple each, which my colleague kindly bought, and the head teacher announced and presented at an assembly.

Below is the daughter giving it a hug;  when I brought it home safely from school (I had several moments of trepidation during its week at school), I gave it a big hug too. 

Squash love, October 2024