Butternuts can please squash bugs as well as the next cucurbit. It's the squash vine boers that they resist. It's a bit late for planting butternuts anyway, even in Zone 8. The probably should have gone in the ground by the end of July.

You can pick the young ones and cook them like zucchini. They are really pretty good. I would let the old fruits stay on the vine as long as possible, until they are dead ripe with no green stripes.

I think I have also read that the squash tastes better after it has been cured a while. Not sure if this applies to one that's not fully ripened, but it might be worth a shot. On the other side of that equation is the fact that early picks don;t keep as well. So, I'd give it some time to sit, but not too much. Dontcha hate all this ambiguous advice? :-)

I don't know how long it takes but it should be on the seed package or a seed site online. I leave them in the field until after the first light frost, oh yeah, you're in Florida! ( sorry, I forgot. lol!) You'll have to go by the number of days. The little curly thing near the fruit should be dead when it's ready, or you can thump it to see if it sounds hollow. (I have never been able to get that, myself. ) When I lived in Ontario I kept my squash in a damp stone root cellar under the very old house spread out on wooden pallets. Many didn't last very long, occasionally one would keep into Jan and the mice nibbled on them, even with two cats. Here in BC, I live on the top floor of a house, our office is on the ground floor and there's a large basement under that. I kept the squash in the office, closed in the wintertime, on an open wire shelf unit with the heat set at 10c to keep the pipes from freezing. It's much drier here than in Ontario also. They all kept much longer. We cooked the last one last week and it was still hard! Last year I left them out in the garden to harden in the sun for a few weeks after cutting off the vine, rolling them every few days or so then brought them in. I didn't do that in Ontario because of the fall rain and the damage from deer running over them, which happened a lot. I'm doing it again this year. I'm impressed with how long they lasted here last winter! I have read that they keep well at a cool room temp so if you have a cool room in your house, I would look at storing them there, someplace with good air circulation and spread out so not to touch each other. They're space hogs.