you can clean/ them with 1:10 ratio bleach:water, to kill any bacteria/mold, dry them being careful not to break the skin, you can then store them in a dry dark area for a few months.

Hi Pat Growing veggies in Florida hot and humid weather is hard to do but not impossible, a lot of winter squash varieties do very well for me and eventually when older get mildews and everything else but I always manage to get a good harvest before it happens. Every year I grow a good and different varieties including the buttercup, right now I have stored for the season a number of winter squash to be used in cooking. When fall comes I will grow the smaller varieties. In the begginning of the season I use Serenade, but that is not a cure all. Sometimes I use Green Cure or Actinovate depending on what I have. Other people use a combination of milk and baking soda but like I said eventually when older all the squash get some kind of mildews in my experience. I just think of the finnish harvest and is all worth it to me.:) Hi Mary! Thank you for your beautiful card! And since you asked me about the taste of the Italian squash, all I have to say is that is tops! I especially liked it agrodolce Italian style, I do this with all my winter squash, cut in pieces, put kosher salt, pepper, balsamic vinegar, olive oil and sometimes a little bit of maple syrup. Because is so big, it is sold by the piece at the Italian market and I did sampled when I was there in risoottos and pastas. I am in Jamaica this week and I already finnish reading by the beach a book 100 Vegetables and Where They Came From, very, very interesting! and I was happy to know that I have sampled most of them and the ones that I did not, are on the list to try. The good thing about the book is that it also gives you simple recipes and combinations of food to try... Silvia

I'm not sure I agree with the point that pulling it too early, will result in it not storing well. I have had very few squash spoil. I have had many store 8-12 months before eating them and I had one that I ate at the ripe old age of 16 months and it was just fine (I label all my squash with the date they were picked). I just ate one that was picked last August and grown from a Buttercup that was hand pollinated with a pumpkin flower (ButterPump) . I didn't think it would last because it looked like a pumpkin and was fairly thin, but again it was just fine. I also still have about 4-5 Triamble that were picked last summer although these guys are so solid with such hard skin that I think they would last near forever! Seems like a fair amount of data indicating picking early doesn't adversely affect how they store. My daughter thinks I should perform a taste test experiment but I think I'll just continue cutting them when I decide they're done.

I harvest winter squash once the rinds are very hard and I am sure they are mature. Cut them, don't pull them, and leave 2-3" of stem attached. Don't carry them by the stems because they may partially detach and then bacterial gets into the fruit and causes it to spoil and rot. I usually cure them for about 2 weeks, in the shade, on tables lined up under the covered patio. They might get an hour or two of morning sun but that's about it. If it has been rainy and they were kinda heavy with water when harvested, I generally lay wire racks on top of the tables which lifts them up above the table top a little bit and allows better air flow. After they are cured, I store them wherever I have space available. The best location is a place where the temperature stays above 50 degrees and the air is cool and dry. Humidity of 60-70% is preferred, but I've stored them at much higher RH values and much lower ones and it has worked fine as long as I had cured them well in the first place. Here's a list of the various places I've stored them over the years: on the floor of the walk-in pantry, on the floor of the linen closet, in the concrete tornado shelter, on a baker's rack in the laundry room, on shelves in the garage (which is well-insulated but unheated) and even on shelves in the potting shed (which is not well-insulated and is unheated). As long as they were well-cured before being stored, they are pretty happy wherever I store them. The C. moschata types store the longest for me and, among the C. moschata types, Seminole always stores for the longest period of time. I've had them last 12-18 months although I consider anything above 8-10 months to be just pure luck. If you grow acorn squash and spaghetti squash, they are not cured and stored like the rest of the winter squash. At most, under normal cool or cold storage conditions, they're only going to last a few weeks, not a few months and you don't cure them because they'll deteriorate quickly during the curing process and you'll miss your chance to use them.