Squashes – a historical perspective
August 8 is Sneak Zucchini onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Day, but I contend anonymous sharing of the wealth should be at least a month-long celebration. Makes me want to have a neighbor… or maybe not, because I have a porch.
Famous nature observer Dave Barry remarked, “The trouble is you cannot grow just one zucchini. Minutes after you plant a single seed, hundreds of zucchini will barge out of the ground and sprawl around the garden, menacing other vegetables. At night, you will be able to hear the ground quake as more and more zucchini erupt.”
Perhaps he was exaggerating or simply being dramatic, but I have caused my own dramatic circumstances by bringing in yet another armload of summer squash such as yellow crooknecks, zucchini and pattypans. These are members of the Cucurbita pepo species, and we usually harvest them before they grow too large and the skin gets tough.
Cucurbita maxima and C. moschata are species of winter squash varieties – butternuts, hubbards, buttercups, bananas, pumpkins and many others. Clever researchers recovered squash seeds from sites in the hills of western Peru, and quick use of a hand-held Presto-matic time-dater meter determined some of them were around 10,400 years old. This would predate the domesticated use of corn by at least 4000 years.
It is speculated that squashes are the oldest cultivated vegetables in North America. Smarty-pants vegetable history people point out the plethora of wild squash species growing in southern Mexico as an indication that is where squashes originated. The first domesticated species were probably gourds which were dried and used to carry water.
Squash varieties cross easily, so eventually less bitter and more palatable species sprouted and squashes spread south to Patagonia and north at least as far as the Wampanoag territory in what we now call New England. In fact, it is from the Wampanoag word “askutasquash” we borrowed our word “squash.” What if we had borrowed “askuta” instead?
One might wonder how squashes spread so far. To be honest, we moderns are not the first to study the stars, sing songs or sneak zucchini onto the neighbor’s porch. History records that Native Americans in the northeast grew several kinds of both summer and winter askuta varieties. It took a severe winter or two before European settlers learned to appreciate how well hubbards, acorns and butternuts would keep during long winters.
Native nations in what is now the southwest part of the United States ate mature squash by baking them in the coals of a fire, but they also dried strips of fresh squash in the sun and stored the strips for rehydrating during winter. Squash blossoms were a favorite item of the Zuni nation.
The early European settlers would cut a hole around the stem of a pumpkin or large squash, clean out the seeds, fill the interior with fruit, spices and honey or syrup, put the stem back in place and bake the whole thing. One flattened pale pumpkin heirloom variety that was popular in the northeast we now call a Long Island Cheese squash because it looks like a cheese wheel.
Summer and winter squash varieties grow well in northeast Arkansas. In fact, two archeologists studied the inedible C. pepo ozarkana, known as the Ozark gourd, and are convinced this native wild cucurbit, which resembles a chicken egg, is the ancestor from which eastern North American summer squashes evolved. They found it flourishing in woods along the White and Buffalo Rivers.
Also flourishing in our part of Arkansas are squash bugs. An adult will lay a merciless mass of eggs on the underside of an askuta leaf, and before a gardener ever has a clue, hordes of the interlopers will enervate your previously robust vines. What to do? In my experience, yelling does not help. Aside from constant vigilance, relentless hand-picking, a gardener might need neem oil or soap sprays and plenty of luck.