We’ve spent the last few weeks feeling quietly smug about our tomato crop (while innumerable other bloggers were despondently ditching there blight ravaged plants, we actually got a half decent crop – but only because we put ours in a polytunnel!).   But now we find ourselves asking the same “was it worth it?” question about our butternut squash.

The plants were huge (you can see them in the bottom right of the picture here).    Each one – we had 4 – probably covered  3-4 square metres, and this is the crop we got :

That'll be about 2 square metres per squash then

The area they consumed wasn’t an issue – the ground was spare this year anyway – but if they’d been on a conventional veg patch, it would have been a spectacularly poor use of space.

We’re guessing that the very dry September played a part too – there were quite a few small fruits that might have made it to a usable size if they’d had a bit more water to bulk them up – but it didn’t rain for a month, and we clearly weren’t attentive enough with the irrigation.

That aside, if you’ve got the space, they’re an easy, if rampant, crop;  they cover the ground very efficiently, need no weeding (nothing competes with these guys) and in a normal season, would probably yield acceptably, if not well.

You can see from the picture that we had a bit of variation too – all 4 plants were from the same seed packet, from a very well respected seed merchant, and , well, some of them aren’t butternut squash are they??

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 19:00 and is filed under General gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.