Radicchio harvests and butternut squash preparations

Right now we’re harvesting raddichio di Treviso (recipe in the book, Minding My Peas and Cucumbers: Quirky Tales of Allotment Life, if you don’t know how to cook them, or if you’ve grown them and found them too bitter to eat) which, to my mind, is as pretty as any houseleek or ornamental cabbage, and much tastier.

We’ve also been busy repurposing stuff – the bamboo that we cut down is going to be part of the butternut squash frame: OH has drilled the holes in the frame and we’re poking the bamboo stems down to make supports for the squashes themselves. You can get some idea of the scale from OH's hand in the photo!

Butternut squash are relatively heavy and need a lot of sun to cure, so we have to find a balance between their weight and wanting as many of them to last as long as possible. Most people grow them along the ground, where the vines spread prolifically, but we find that they often get slug or woodlouse damage at the point where the young green squash forms and touches the soil, and once that happens the squash does not store well. Also, the last couple of years our wetter late summer weeks have caused many ground-growing butternuts to get mildew.

So the frame: we will tie in the vine to uprights and stretch wire across to make some horizontal supports to which we can attach the squashes – sometimes I’ll crochet a little hammock to support the squash, so it stretches as the squash does. Yes, I know how insane that sounds, but believe me, you can do the same thing with the net bags from supermarkets, as long as the squash has cured enough for the netting not to cut into the flesh and as long as the bag is big enough to stretch to the full size of the squash.

Labels: butternut-squash, radicchio de treviso