Tag Archives: summer squash

Summer Squash: Ways to Use & Preserve It

Summer squash plants are incredibly productive. New and seasoned gardeners alike often grow much more than their families can use.

When you feel like you’re drowning in fresh produce, it’s easy to let some go or toss it in the compost bin, but there are other options. Here are a few ways we recommend to use up a large harvest of summer squash. 

Donate your excess. 

Home gardeners may get tired of summer squash, but fresh produce can be a luxury for others. If you have extra summer squash (or any other vegetable), we recommend donating some to your local food bank. Here are some resources you can use to find a food bank near you:

Ferment it.

Fermenting is an easy, safe way to preserve food. There’s no need to stand over a hot canner all day! Fermented foods are also full of helpful bacteria that are great for gut health. Check out this recipe for Lacto-Fermented Summer Squash from Cultures for Health.

Dry it.

If you’ve got a dehydrator, you can quickly dry large amounts of summer squash. It’s excellent sliced into thin strips and salted for a crunchy, potato chip-like snack. It and also be shredded or chopped and dried for use this winter in soups, stews, and baked goods. 

Prepare your squash as desired and lay it out on a dehydrator tray in a single layer. Then lightly salt your squash. Note: thicker pieces of squash will take much longer to dry.

Dry your squash at 130-140°F until your squash is completely dry and brittle. Store in an airtight container until you’re ready to use. 

Alternatively, squash can be sliced into rings, hung, and dried over an open fire or woodstove. 

To use in cooked dishes, add it to your recipe with a bit of liquid for the last few minutes of cooking. To use shredded squash in baked goods, cover it with warm water for about 5 minutes before adding to your mix.

Freeze it.

Like dehydrated squash, frozen squash is perfect for winter use in soups, stews, and baked goods. The first step is to shred or cube your fresh squash.

Blanching

To ensure it doesn’t get mushy, you need to blanch your squash before freezing. Place your squash in boiling water for exactly 1 minute. Then remove your squash with a slotted spoon and place it in ice water for one minute to immediately stop the cooking. Drain your squash on a clean towel.

Flash Freeze

To keep your squash from freezing into one solid clump, you can use a technique called flash freezing; this works best with the squash cubes or chunks. Spread your drained squash onto a cookie sheet with parchment paper and freeze for at least one hour before transferring to a container.

Alternatively, you can measure squash out for your favorite recipes ahead of time; this works best with shredded squash for baked goods and sauces.

Frozen squash will last up to 10 months.

Can it.

Canning summer squash can be tricky because it is a low-acid food. Ball canning no longer has recipes for canning it on their website or in their book. However, some people still do by pressure canning or adding acidic ingredients.

Pressure Canned Squash

If you’ve got a pressure canner, you can put up plain summer squash as you would many other vegetables. You can find a recipe here.

Pickled Summer Squash

Pickling summer squash is relatively easy and a lot like pickling cucumbers. Just make sure you follow the recipe.

Pineapple Squash

One of my favorite ways to preserve summer squash and zucchini is to make “pineapple squash.” Basically, you can your squash in pineapple juice, and the mild-flavored squash takes on the pineapple flavor. I love it for pizza and sweet and sour stir-fries. 

You can find a recipe here.

Recipes

There are so many ways to use fresh summer squash, and thanks to the internet, we now get to see so many creative recipes. Here are a few we thought you all might enjoy.

7 Crops You Can Plant in July

Spring and summer always seem to go so fast. There’s so much to get done in the garden. We’re headed into July, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t still get some plants in. Here are a few summer crops you can sow this month.

Beans

Beans are a productive, quick-growing crop that’s perfect for sowing late in the season. You’ll need to water them thoroughly, especially as they get established, but they tolerate the midsummer heat with no problems. 

For late sowings, some of our favorites are bush snap beans like Provider, Royalty Purple Pod, Contender (Buff Valentine), and Blue Lake Bush (Blue Lake 274). These varieties are all ready to harvest in 48 to 55 days. 

Collards

The classic hot weather green, collards can be sowed right through summer. During the summer, they’re lovely shredded and added to stir-fries, salads, and slaws or blended into smoothies. As the weather cools in the fall, you can add them to soups and chili. They can also be fermented to make kraut or kimchi.

Some of our favorite varieties for summer planting include Georgia Green (Georgia Southern, Creole) Collards, Green Glaze Collards, Whaley’s Favorite Cabbage Collards, and Vates Collards. They’re ready to harvest in as little as 68 days. 

Corn

Corn thrives during the summer heat. It’s an excellent crop for succession planting to spread out your harvest. When selecting a variety, check the days to harvest to ensure that you choose a variety that will mature before your area’s first frost date. 

A few quick maturing varieties include Buhl Sweet Corn (81 days), Chires Baby Sweet Corn (75 days), Country Gentleman Sweet Corn (93 days), and Bodacious RM (75 days) which is one of the few hybrid corn varieties we carry. 

You may notice a few dent corn varieties, such as Reid’s Yellow Dent Corn, have two maturity dates listed. The first date is for roasting, and the second is for grinding and drying. If you’re interested in roasting, Reid’s (85/110 days), Hickory King (85/110 days), and Hickory Cane (85/110 days) are options.

Homemade Pickles Pickling Cucumber

Cucumbers

Both pickling and slicing cucumbers are dependable summer crops. They can be sown in July and tolerate the heat well as long as they’re watered consistently. 

Some of our favorite options for pickling cucumbers include Arkansas Little Leaf (59 days) and Homemade Pickles (55 days). They’re both vigorous, productive, and disease resistant. 

If you’re want to sow slicing cucumbers, this July some of our favorites include White Wonder (58 days), which is very productive in hot weather, and Marketmore 76 (57 days) and Straight Eight (57 days), which are very dependable and productive. 

Southern Peas

Southern peas are also called cowpeas, crowder peas, field peas, or black-eyed peas. They’re an incredibly productive staple crop that can be grown when both days and nights are warm for a period of 60-90 days.

They’re drought-resistant and do well in warm soil. We still have some varieties available. However, the pandemic seed orders sales surge has especially affected our inventory for southern peas. New seed crops are being grown out – we’ll have more seed available again in Nov/Dec 2021!

Summer Squash and Zucchini

Summer squash and zucchini thrive in the summer heat. They’re quick to mature and are ready to harvest in between 48 and 68 days. 

Some of the varieties we recommend include Black Beauty Zucchini (48 days), Early Prolific Straightneck Summer Squash (48 days), Benning’s Green Tint Summer Squash (52 days). They’re vigorous and productive. 

Swiss Chard

Many greens don’t stand up to the summer heat, but Swiss chard will produce all summer and into fall. They can be harvested in as little as 25 days for baby greens or 50 to 60 days for mature leaves.

Perpetual Spinach (Leaf Beet Chard) is a great hot weather substitute for spinach in the southeast. Rainbow Swiss chard is a great way to add both beauty and flavor to the garden. Barese is sweeter than other chard varieties.

Add a few of these to your garden this July for delicious late summer and fall harvests. 

Summer Sowings: Continuous Harvests all Summer and into Fall

With summer’s intense heat in full swing, it can be hard to remember to sow cool season crops, but some fall crops need to be started as early as June, and many need to be started in July.

On our farm in central Virginia our average first fall frost falls in late October, but even where frosts come later or not at all you should start fall crops during the summer. Later plantings will struggle with fall’s low light levels, and won’t produce before growth slows to a near standstill in early winter (the “Persephone Days,” November 21-January 21).

To make sense of all the seeds we’re sowing during the summer months, I divide our summer plantings into three types:

1. Warm-season, slow growing summer successions: these are the bonus crops that many gardeners forget. A second round of tomatoes, summer squash, sweet corn, or cucumbers can keep you harvesting all summer long without interruption.

2. Fast growing summer successions: these crops require frequent, regular sowing all through summer. Because we’re sowing so often, these can be easier to remember. We sow beans, carrots, salad greens, beets, and radish seeds weekly. Be ready to baby your summer sowings: we water daily to keep them from drying out before sprouting. Lettuce needs the soil temperature to be below 80 degrees F, so you may need to sow in flats indoors, or even in the refrigerator, or sow in the evening and cool the soil with crushed ice.

3. Cool season, slow growing crops for fall harvest. We sow the Brassicas first: Brussels sprouts in June, and then broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower in July. By mid-July we’re sowing fall greens: collards, Swiss chard, leaf beet, and kale, plus winter radishes. We sow Chinese cabbage in late July. Sow thickly in nursery beds and keep up with your watering; we protect these young plants from summer’s insects with spun polyester row cover or the new more durable and temperature neutral “proteknet.”

For further resources on planning your summer sowings, check out: Brett Grohsgal’s article Simple Winter Gardening, our article on Summer Succession Plantings, and our Fall and Winter Planting Guide.

Successions can be overwhelming, so we have some tricks that help extend harvests with fewer plantings:

1. Plant indeterminate varieties of tomatoes and cucumbers, and pole-type beans and peas. We still find we need a late tomato planting, because our earliest plantings taper down toward the end of summer (and our Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello needs lots of tomatoes for the Tasting Tent).

2. Select heirlooms bred to provide extended harvests: many modern farms want concentrated harvests that can be harvested with one or two passes; but for more traditional growers an extended harvest was the ideal way to manage the bounty. Look for roots that hold well in the ground. Lutz beets are one of our favorites: they can be spring planted and will hold all summer without turning woody. However, they will be very large, so this only works if you’re happy cooking with multi-pound beets (try slicing cross-wise for beet burgers). Open-pollinated broccoli provides extended side-shoot harvests. Choose bolt-resistant greens and harvest by the leaf before before taking whole plants.

3. Choose seasonally appropriate salad greens: we want salads all year-round, but this can be tricky both when it’s hot and when it’s cold! Mustards and brassicas are more mild in cold weather, so get adventurous by adding young kale and tatsoi to winter and early spring salads. Choose cold-tolerant lettuce: red varieties tend to hold up better in frost. For hot weather, choose fast-growing summer crisphead lettuce like Sierra, or heat-ready greens like Red Malabar spinach or Golden purslane.

4. Set up a root cellar or similar storage system. Ultimately, some of your crops will ripen all at once, or you’ll be faced with a glut of produce when frosts threaten. Be prepared: have a proper storage area ready to go for your carrots, parsnips, turnips, cabbages, winter squash, and more. Be ready to finish ripening the last fresh tomatoes indoors. For fresh produce through till spring, we need good systems for storing and slowly working through the harvest. Nancy Bubel’s Root Cellaring is an invaluable resource if you’re looking to improve your winter storage system, and has lots of low-cost and little-time options, if you haven’t blocked off your whole summer to dig a cellar.