Butternut Pumpkin (Waltham Butternut Squash) Is An Amazingly Tasty Variety

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Sweet butternut pumpkin with an excellent nutty flavor, buttery, dense, orange flesh, it keeps well in the house all winter

Who among the gardeners doesn't dream of growing something new and super wonderful? And if this happens, then this event always happens at the level of a small, but discovery.

In the summer of 2008, we were vacationing in Greece. Walking around Thessaloniki, my wife and I went to the grocery store and in the vegetable department bought two small pumpkins of light cream color, shaped like half a dumbbell. It was early July. The pumpkin houses are perfectly preserved, and in winter it's time to try them. As always, I had no time, and my wife took the first sample herself. Here is her impression: “Yura, when I was cooking pumpkin porridge, something distracted me, and I forgot to salt the porridge, besides that, I forgot to add sugar, as I always do with our usual large-fruited pumpkins. But, having tasted the porridge, I realized that there was no need to add salt or sugar. The porridge was delicious without it. " And she also said that such porridge can be eaten without bread, and in general it is the most delicious pumpkin she has ever tasted. “You know,” she added,- just this one pumpkin will be enough for the two of us for dinner."

In studying the history of this strain, I found that the woman was right. The Waltham Butternut Squash pumpkin is considered the American pumpkin champion for its palatability. This butternut pumpkin variety, called Waltham, was developed in 1960 at the Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station by crossing cultivated butternut pumpkins with wild African pumpkins. It turns out that this ultra-early ripening variety with a period from germination to harvest of 85-95 days is widely known and grown all over the world: in Australia, Africa, Europe, Asia and America and is a source of food for all five continents.

How do you like it: one of the best butternut pumpkins in the world - butternut pumpkin, with an excellent nutty flavor, sweet, with an oily, dense, orange pulp and the ability to last all winter when stored just on the floor in the hallway, one might say, is not at all known in Russia? As a consolation, we can say that butternates in Europe appeared, after all, relatively recently, and even in the UK are still considered a novelty. The same cannot be said about Argentina, from where these pumpkins are exported all over the world.

Butternut pumpkin plants grow vigorous and long-leaved. The number of small, weighing from 500 g to 1 kg of fruits can be quite large, for example, with timely picking of fruits (you do not need to keep the fruits on the bushes for a long time, since when the seeds ripen in them, the growth of the remaining fruits is delayed) it is possible to remove up to 30 pumpkins from one plants. Unripe fruits are greenish in color, then they will ripen while lying on the floor and acquire a characteristic beige color, just do not remove the one-day fruits of milk ripeness for ripening, they will not be able to ripen.

Of course, it is necessary to grow butternut pumpkin in our conditions (in the Moscow region) through seedlings. Plant the seeds in containers around May 10. For seeds to germinate, they need to provide a warm ground (keep the pots in a greenhouse on solar heating or under a lamp until germination). In the cold ground, the seeds are cut from the inside. It is not necessary to soak them. Plant seedlings in the ground when the threat of frost has finally passed. Some not very knowledgeable people confuse this pumpkin with a squash because of its small size, but it has a cut that does not look like a squash at all. This pumpkin with a "thick, straight neck and a bulb at the end" has a small cavity with seeds inside this "bulb". The rest of the butternut pumpkin's body is filled with tender orange flesh. By the way, thanks to its orange color, butternut is a rich source of antioxidants.

It is not hard to guess that there are an unimaginable variety of recipes for preparing dishes from this pumpkin. The description of them will require, perhaps, a separate section of the cookbook. All over the world, butternut is mentioned in recipes for vegetable, meat, cereal, pasta dishes, as well as soups, mashed potatoes, sauces. It is widely used for stuffing. Puddings, cakes, pastries, candied fruits are made from it. Finally, it is fried and boiled. I personally, I love it fried, just in butter, it turns out slices with a light toasted crust, it literally melts in your mouth.

Friends, I have grown the Greek version of the famous American butternut pumpkin in my suburbs and offer you its seeds. The undoubted advantage of growing this variety is that it is not cross-pollinated with large-fruited pumpkins widespread in Russia and with hard-bore pumpkins, including squash and squash. Therefore, when receiving your seeds, beware of cross-pollination only with nutmeg varieties, which are not so many in our everyday life.

I send seeds of butternut pumpkin - portioned, nutmeg, the world leader among pumpkins in taste, as well as seeds of Lagenaria Speckled goose with a swan neck, Little Leaf cucumber - varieties of the XXI century with a small leaf, cowpea beans with a pod length of up to 1 m and other rare crops and varieties; seedlings of grapes, apple trees, pears of frost-resistant varieties. To receive the catalog, send an envelope with a return address: 140181, Moscow region, Zhukovsky, PO Box 135 - to Yuri Valentinovich Petrov.