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Hello everyone. Newbie here making very first post, so please forgive any daft mistakes!
This is my first year with a garden and I planted Waltham butternut squash because I saw the seed packet in the supermarket and I like to eat them. I didn't really know what I was doing and undoubtedly did lots of things wrong, but ended up with four triffids which have 20 squash on them. All of the fruit are full-sized, but a couple are still looking very green. I know you are supposed to look at the stems to see when they are ripe, but I can't see a difference between the stems on the oldest fruit and those on the youngest.
The squash seem to have ripened quite a bit in the last week. We've had clear blue skies and sunshine every day (after three weeks of rain from the beginning of Sept), but the nights have been getting very cold and we had the first frost last night. I covered the plants so they survived, but I'm wondering whether to take the fruit off the vines now and put them in the sunniest place in the garden to ripen/mature/cure. Or is it better to leave them on the vine and cover them again tonight? The nights are supposed to get warmer again from tomorrow and they're predicting sunshine and showers later in the week.
This is my first year with a garden and I planted Waltham butternut squash because I saw the seed packet in the supermarket and I like to eat them. I didn't really know what I was doing and undoubtedly did lots of things wrong, but ended up with four triffids which have 20 squash on them. All of the fruit are full-sized, but a couple are still looking very green. I know you are supposed to look at the stems to see when they are ripe, but I can't see a difference between the stems on the oldest fruit and those on the youngest.
The squash seem to have ripened quite a bit in the last week. We've had clear blue skies and sunshine every day (after three weeks of rain from the beginning of Sept), but the nights have been getting very cold and we had the first frost last night. I covered the plants so they survived, but I'm wondering whether to take the fruit off the vines now and put them in the sunniest place in the garden to ripen/mature/cure. Or is it better to leave them on the vine and cover them again tonight? The nights are supposed to get warmer again from tomorrow and they're predicting sunshine and showers later in the week.
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