What to Do with Too Many Pumpkins: A Happy August Problem

The wheelbarrow did not make it to the porch this morning. I loaded it out in the patch, got about forty feet, and had to stop and pull half of them back out because the front wheel was sinking into the soft ground by the hose bib. That is the point in the season we have reached. If you are standing in your kitchen wondering what to do with too many pumpkins and winter squash, welcome. It is a good problem to have, and I have been solving it the same way for years.

The first honeynuts came in last week and there are butternuts sizing up behind them. By September the moschata vines will be handing over more than the counter can hold. Every year I forget how quickly it turns from watching for the first fruit to running out of flat surfaces.

So the surplus can go in a few directions, and none of them is the compost pile.

Start Here When You Have Too Many Pumpkins

Sort them first, because the right answer depends entirely on which ones you are holding. Anything with a soft spot, a bruise, a cracked stem, or a fresh gouge from the wheelbarrow is not going to store. Those come inside today and go in the oven this week.

Halve them, scoop, roast cut side down at four hundred degrees until a knife slides through with no resistance. That is the whole technique. The flesh lifts out of the shell and becomes soup, or pie filling, or the base of a pan of something with butter and sage in it. Roasted squash also freezes beautifully in flat bags, which is how most of my damaged fruit ends up surviving until January anyway.

The seeds from those come out too. Rinse them, dry them, toss with salt and a little fat, and roast low until they snap.

Cure and Store the Ones That Are Sound

The undamaged fruit is where the real answer lives. A winter squash that has been cured properly is not a problem to be solved this week. It is dinner in February.

Curing is about two weeks of warm, sheltered rest that hardens the rind and turns starch into sugar, and it is the whole difference between a squash that lasts a month and one that lasts half a year. I wrote the method out in full in the curing guide, temperatures and timing and all. It is the least work for the most return of anything I do in the fall.

Not every variety rewards the effort the same way. The moschata types keep for months and the thin-skinned orange ones simply do not, which is most of the reason our shelves lean the way they do. If you are already thinking about next season, the varieties that actually last all winter are worth reading before you order anything.

What to Do with Too Many Pumpkins When the Shelf Is Full

Give them away. I mean that as the practical answer, not the sentimental one.

A cured winter squash is one of the few things from a garden that does not wilt in the back of a car. It sits on somebody's counter looking handsome for weeks and then it feeds them. Ours go over the fence to neighbors, to the food pantry, to the woman who asked about the Long Island Cheese one autumn and now quietly expects one every year.

Food banks are glad to take fresh winter squash, and it is one of the better things you can hand them, because it needs no refrigeration and it does not spoil in a week. Call ahead, most have a drop-off window.

There is a thing permaculture people say about the yield of a system being unlimited if you count everything that leaves it. I think about that in August. The patch does not really produce squash. It produces squash, and soup, and a reason to knock on a door.

Save Seed from the Best One

Before the pile disappears, walk out and pick the best fruit in it and set that one aside. Not the biggest. The best. The one that ripened evenly, held its color, and came off a vine that shrugged at July.

That one is next year. Open-pollinated varieties come back true if you keep them away from their cousins while they flower, and that is exactly how these heirlooms reached us in the first place. Somebody in every single generation kept the good one back. Saving the seed takes one afternoon.

Let that fruit sit a few weeks past eating ripe before you open it. The seeds keep filling out in there.

Late morning now and the mug has gone cold beside me, which happens most days around here. There is a pot of the pumpkin spice roast on the counter because it is August and I have no discipline whatsoever about that. The squash are lined up on the porch boards, single layer, not touching, doing the slow quiet work of turning into winter food.

The honest answer to what to do with too many pumpkins is that you will not have too many for very long. You will eat some, store more, hand a few over the fence, and keep one back for seed. And then in March you will be standing over a seed flat wishing the whole season would hurry up and start again. That is the cycle, and it is a good one to be inside of.

From the patch in Newton, Kansas.