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Mystery Squash

December 6th, 2013 · by Cyndi · 3 Comments

It had been about 5 years since my last serious summer garden.  But for 2013, I planted summer squash, cabbage, lettuce, carrots, beans, chard, and a few miscellaneous items with mixed results. My best success was about 100 pounds of Romanesco (summer squash that is like zucchini, with stripes and more flavor) plus others from a bed with 12 seedlings.

Then there were the volunteers.  A boatload of tomatoes and several squash plants, mostly winter.  I got two lovely sugar pie pumpkins, a box load of Delicata, and a mystery vine.

It looked like a bulbous yellow summer squash at first but, picked young, it had no flavor.  I left it on the vine to see what would happen, gave some to the neighbors, and, just before the first frost, ended up with one giant.

17.8 pounds!!

Mystery Squash Whole

 

Could it be a banana squash?  We had indeed bought a banana squash to try from the same local farm a few years ago that the rest of the volunteers seemed to have come from.  But theirs are the pink kind.

Mystery Squash Cut

Cut open, it was a pretty yellow, with a dry core and huge pumpkin-like seeds.

Mystery Squash Seeds

Cooked, it was slightly stringy, but not as much as an (overcooked) spaghetti squash.  It tasted like a mild butternut.  The skin was edible too.  Very thin with a surprisingly nice flavor.  Not my first choice in squashes but quite good.  We wrapped up most of it for the freezer.

Mystery Squash Cooked

So what do you think?  Yellow banana squash?  Random cross between a spaghetti and butternut?  Or something else entirely?

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3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Sheryl // Dec 6, 2013 at 8:37 pm

    I don’t know. Perhaps a Golden Norwitz?

  • 2 Shelly // Dec 7, 2013 at 9:25 am

    Hi, we grow a lot of squash/pumpkins on our farm. The thing about them all is they cross pollinate easily with one another (along with cucumbers and other cucurbits) to form some very different looking fruits. Some are worth eating and some are not. You lucked out to get one worth using. It’s most likely a Pink Banana crossed with something more yellow. Enjoy it, but don’t expect to get anything exactly like it to grow from its seeds should you save them for planting next spring, cross pollination yields very diverse offspring .

  • 3 Cyndi // Dec 7, 2013 at 10:40 am

    Thanks Shelly. Yeah, I know that saving seed won’t work if the squash was grown near other squashes. We roasted them all. The bigger surprise wasn’t that this one was crossed, but that all the other volunteers came true.

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