Garden Review: Scalloped Squash

Scalloped Squash

My parents always had a garden when I was growing up. I don't mention this often, because people always assume that if your parents did something, you just soak up their knowledge through osmosis. Nope, doesn't work that way. I wish it did! It would have saved me twenty years of trial and error. But I digress. I'm not going to talk about my gardening woes today. I'm going to talk about scalloped squash. I've seen them in catalogs for years and always assumed it was just another name for patty pan squash, which my parents always had in their garden when I was growing up. My mother would slice it, bread it, and fry it, and I loved it. I've been growing patty pan squash for as long as we've been on Antiquity Oaks, but last winter when looking through the seed catalogs, something inspired me to order some scalloped squash seeds, which I quickly discovered is quite different from patty pan squash.

Patty pan squash are flatter, and they have a much smaller seed cavity. I kept picking the scalloped squash smaller and smaller, but regardless of how young I picked them, they still had a large seed cavity. Larger seed cavity means less flesh for eating. We're still saying that we're going to use the scalloped squash for stuffing, but we haven't done it yet. Unless we discover some really awesome way to cook these little darlings, they won't be in our garden again, regardless of how cute they look. When we don't eat something, it means we don't pick it, which means it just gets over-ripe and eventually gets fed to the chickens. And that just makes me feel guilty. And who needs that?