Grow • Cook • Eat • Great Squash

Welcome to the home of all things squash.

Here, find winter squash and summer squash garden tips, recipes, personalities, seeds, opinions, history, and lore. Here, we believe that a squash can be the most beautiful, delicious, and wonderful life form. Here, squashpersons unite.

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Squash: A Personal History

This is how I know I’m a country boy. When I was a kid, there was a cartoon on TV called Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. Yes, that Cosby, the one now in prison. The show was one of my favorites. Inspired by his own youth, Bill produced, wrote, and performed in a Saturday morning animated tale of the travails of a ragtag group of kids who hang out in a junkyard in Philadelphia. Between cartoon scenes, Bill would appear in a live action segment in which he’d coach us young viewers to ponder the moral and ethical choices of the story’s protagonists. 

One boy, Dumb Donald, went about his business playing the junkyard trombone and delivering witty lines while never removing a strange conical-shaped thing from his head. This weird ribbed pink object sat over his ears and eyes, with holes cut out so he could see. 

Incidentally, Dumb Donald was voiced by animation legend Lou Scheimer, a white middle-aged German-descended Jew like me, in a screechy, decidedly African-American sounding voice. He delivered one-liners like “You think she’s stoned? I don’t see any rocks!” Different times.

When I was 20 and in college, my girlfriend from Brooklyn referenced Dumb Donald from Fat Albert and how he always had that hat over his eyes.

“That’s a hat?” I exclaimed, “I always thought it was a squash!”

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Kids filter the world around them through what they know best. Clearly, squash was a relevant and present part of my existence as a child. Acorn and buttercup squashes, from my father’s big garden, were always around. Into winter they sat in a damp unlit closet-like room in the basement, beside some moldy books. The extra freezer beside them held bags of parboiled yellow summer squash and green beans. Sometimes my parents sent me or my brother down there on a dark December evening to choose two acorn squashes to bake for dinner. 

I write this in October of 2020, and there’s a cache of butternut squashes in my living room, standing like soldiers on a shelf, waiting.