We're Nuts for Butternuts!

Count 'em, folks! We grew SEVENTEEN butternut squash this year! (Now, did you really count them? If you did, you only found 16. We gave one to a neighbor before we took the photo. ha ha)

Here is the biggest squash next to the smallest:

And, now, for scale:

I weighed that big boy before cooking it, and now I forget how much it weighed! It was too much for my kitchen scale and I had to take it to the bathroom scale. I think it was around 12 lbs.

Here are the three kiddos who did the harvesting, lovingly holding some of the tinier guys. They were very excited when the first use of the squash was one of our favorite recipes, butternut squash gnocchi. Check out the recipe on my other blog, Family Bean (which you may notice has not been updated for all of 2010).

We've never had such a successful butternut crop. They were planted in the same place as last year's cucumbers, so maybe we're onto something. Now we just need to decide what crop we want too much of next year.