How to save your rotting squash or zucchini crop

Every year something new happens in one of my garden beds... Last year it was the cucumber beetle, this year it's rotting zucchini and squash plants. When my plants got nice and big I was looking for first signs of female parts on the plants. I found actually plenty of them and got very excited. When I checked back in two days later, all the tiny zucchini and squash were rotting away. 

(sorry I don't have a picture of that - who wants to remember disaster stage right?)

So what do you do when this happens in your garden? (Also read below pictures how to prevent it) Sprinkle dry egg shells and mulch all over the plants base and water throughly. Yes, it's that easy. It worked miracles. See, what the plant is lacking, is some calcium and the egg shells will fix just that!

The next zucchini that showed up after I sprinkled the egg shells looked like this and went all the way. So did the next dozen zucchini and squash!

So how can you prevent this from happening? My grandpa used to collect dry egg shells and kept them in the freezer at all times. Then when he was ready to plant the squash seeds, he would sprinkle the shells in the hole directly with the seed. This way the seed would have plenty of calcium supply right away from the start!

Hope this helps! 

Freezing summer squash

I have been spending quite some time in my kitchen preserving herbs and the last of veggies from my garden. Now I am sharing the way I freeze summer squash.

I wash and cut the heads in half. Then I scooped up the seeds from the middle and placed the halves on a cookie sheet. I put some olive oil on the cut halves and salted them just a bit. Then they were ready to be put in the oven at 400 degrees for about 40 minutes.

After the 40 minutes, I checked if they were soft enough to take out. Depends on your oven, you might check earlier. I took them out and let them cool down. Then I scooped up the flesh an pureed them in the blender.

Muffin pan would be the best to freeze them in smaller portions (by the way, this reminds me of making baby food for my kids - if you are doing that, don't salt the halves and put the pureed mixture in ice cube trays). I let it freeze overnight - don't panic if you forget about them... They will be fine until you actually need the muffin pan ;-) (you might want to cover it though)

Last step was bagging and labeling the squash for storage in the freezer! I can add this to my soups or simply spice it and use it as a side dish (cinnamon and vanilla sugar tastes especially good for kids' snacks - just saying ;-)