Some extraordinary gardeners like Virgil Severns and Terry Reichardt have been growing winter squash in Alaska for years, but for us ordinary gardeners, it’s becoming a much more reliable and feasible crop.
If you’re gardening for food security, squash is a great option because you can store it without having to freeze or can it (and incidentally, you should NOT can pumpkins or squash at home according to the National Center for Home Food Preservation, but you can can cube winter squash). Storing as is saves time during the mad dash of fall when we are trying to cook and eat all of the fresh produce from the garden or preserve what we can’t eat as well as pick berries, fish and hunt. Not only does winter squash actually provide some calories, as opposed to greens, it is also paleo friendly, gluten free, delicious and nutritious. If you don’t have the space to grow squash, you can find locally available winter squash here (www.buyalaskagrown.com).
In Fairbanks some varieties are performing incredibly well in unreplicated trials. In 2020, spaghetti squash yielded 85 pounds per plant while Gete-Okosomin produced 48 pounds per plant. Harvest moon and red kuri performed best in 2021, producing 35 and 43 pounds of squash per plant, respectively. Gete-Okosomin, red kuri, Lakota, and Honeyboat topped the charts in terms of taste.
This year, 12 varieties of winter squash are being trialed in Fairbanks, so stay tuned for those results. Winter squash performed a lot less well in unreplicated trials at the Matanuska Experiment Farm. Glenna Gannon, director of the vegetable variety trials, figures it could have been that Typar landscape fabric or infrared transmitting or IRT plastic was not used, the temperature is cooler than Fairbanks, and the transplants were not fertilized. She thinks a hoop house or high tunnel could make all the difference in successfully growing winter squash in the Matanuska Valley or cooler parts of Alaska.
Acorn, butternut, delicata and sweet dumpling squash are sensitive to long days and, as a result, do not reliably produce female flowers, particularly in the more northern parts of Alaska.
You’ll want to start seeds in late April to early May in 4-inch pots and transplant them outside after the danger of frost has passed. You can also cover them with frost cloth or remay crop cover to give them some extra protection in case of a frost. As with most vegetables, close to a neutral pH is ideal for squash. They are heavy nitrogen feeders.
If you have the space, plant your squash in a different spot each year to minimize diseases and pests. You’ll want to use one or more season extension techniques to grow the winter squash — plastic mulch, low tunnel, high tunnel or a greenhouse. In Fairbanks trials, the squash is planted in infrared transmitting mulch with the space between rows covered in typar. The typar helps minimize rotting by keeping …….