Hey Carol, My best advice would be to leave them on the vine for a few more weeks. Acorn squash are interesting in that they do eventually turn orange like a pumpkin but they are mature even before that when they are dark green. Basically, as you might or might not know, squashes are divided into two categories. There are "summer squashes" and "winter squashes." Summer squashes include zucchini and are harvested BEFORE they are mature. This allows the flesh to be very soft, squishy, and palatable with little cooking. Also, the seeds are edible at this stage and thus do not need to be removed but may be eaten. Winter squashes however are harvested AFTER they have matured. The flesh is usually harder, must be cooked longer, and the seeds are very hard, mature, and must be removed prior to cooking. This is why we remove pumpkin seeds and in your case, butternut squash seeds and acorn squash seeds. Since acorn squash and butternut squash are both winter squashes, they can be harvested any time after they have matured, giving you a much larger window during which you may pick them. Essentially, it is never too late to harvest a winter squash. By that same token, it IS too late to harvest summer squashes when they have matured unless you want to remove the mature seeds. What this boils down to is that you should wait a few more weeks for your acorn squashes to grow. I've grown acorn squashes for a few years now and they usually are ready by the second week in August but never before the third week of July and my zone is 6. Hopefully that helped! Good luck! Joer

If the squash is completely ripe and it is an acorn, sweet dumpling or delicata you could cook it the same day. The literature say that acorns, and delicatas do not need to be cured. But I find them sweeter if cured. If cooking the same day, it may need some sugar to help them out. The first time that I grew squash it was not on purpose. In 2004, I tossed some squash innards out in the flower bed out front as I thought the natural fertilizer would be good for the soil, plus best to keep decomposable stuff out of the landfill. It never occurred to me they would sprout. It was fun to watch them grow. I did not take care of them and let them do their own thing. I think they did well since it was on the north east side of the house and in Texas afternoon shade is a very good thing. I was so excited to see about 5 ripe acorn squash. I picked them all. I sliced one in half, and to my surprise, the squash did not seem like the correct color. I cooked it anyway. It did not taste good. I tossed the rest of the unripe squash out side under a large bush. Moral of this story, if you do not know if something is ripe, don't pick them all! This experience was so much fun, I decided to garden on purpose. In 2005, on the west side of the house, I planted sugar pumpkins and buttercups. I planted them in spring. All the squash died of the dreaded squash borer, but the sugar pumpkin did great. When the pumpkins turned orange, I picked them all. They tasted horrible. Here is another opportunity for a moral. First, if you messed up the first time, figure out why, and don't keep picking unripe squash! Oh yes, and don't pick them all. The other moral is, in Texas, full sun does not really mean, full sun all day! I moved my garden from the south west back side of the house which gets hot afternoon sun to the south east side of the house which gets shade after 2-3 pm depending how far away from house the bed is. I looked up how to figure out when winter squash are ripe. So geared up with that info,. I tried again for a fall harvest. Again, I planted buttercup and sugar pumpkin. This time, all the sugar pumpkins died due to heat, and lack of water. I somehow had the idea plants can take care of themselves. This is probably true, but not if you are growing them out of their native area, and not if your area is in an extreme drought as we were. Another moral, squash need to be watered, especially if one lives in Texas. The buttercup still got squash borer, but survived it. I think this is because in Texas fall crops just plain do better. Fruit has an easier time maturing in cool fall verses our inferno of a summer. The other reason I believe they did better was because, I did not yank them up when they got borer. I put soil over the vines in many places to encourage rooting. If the main plant dies the place beyond the new root should survive. Also, warm weather crops if planted in cool damp soil will get more critters. The critters are nature's way of eliminating sick plants so they will not make it to maturity, make seeds, and thus make more sick plants. If a plant gets critters, it is not suffering a pesticide deficiency. The usual problems are, Seed planted when soil is too cool, too wet, or just plan wrong time of year. I just read someplace that seeds started in a relatively dry soil do better. Spring growth is often sappy. Selecting the incorrect variety for your area. Believe me, planting seeds from northern catalog, sets a Texas gardener up for failure. I now select varieties listed in the seed savers exchange yearbook by southern gardeners. When purchasing catalog seeds, I select viney verses bushy crops. Seed catalogs try to be as vague as possible so they dont discourage folks from regions that certain seed varieties canÂt possibly do well, from wasting money on their seeds. For example California blackeye pea which is a bush plant, did very poorly. Texas longhorn cowpea, which has a 7 foot vine, did not seem to be bothered much in last year's drought. Baby blue hubbard which is bushy, died of borer. Anna Swartz hubbard has a long, long vine, did great. I believe this is because, deep roots come with a plant with long vines. I believe deep roots will help a plant survive extreme rain and frost better too. The roots go below the level of the wet, dry, hot or cold soil. We have been dumped on this year in Texas by lots and lots of rain. My pole beans did just fine. The leaves of the bush beans got full of holes. I won't be planting beans in spring anymore though. They don't have time to make many beans before it just gets too hot. Planting root crops in spring verses fall. Spring weather encourages seed development, and leafy growth verses root growth. Planting too close together. You know when someone stands too close to you, you feel like they are in your space, I think plants must feel that way too. It can be surprising how deep and wide roots grown. On this site, root development of vegetable crops, they show how deep the roots grow. If you don't have time to read the text, just scroll down to see the pictures. After reading this site, I often about double the suggested seed distances. Watering too much. I live in Texas, so in the heat of summer, I might see plants suffering from heat stress, but rarely see a bug. I usually only see bugs, when rain is more frequent (like spring and fall), or I goof up and water too much. "I believe" city water can kill beneficial microbes on the surface of the leaves; so I avoid getting foliage wet when hose watering. " I think" this is the reason rain does not seem to bother leaves like city water can. Plus when it rains, it tends to be cloudy, which protects the leaves from scorching. If you water too much the surface soil says wet so the roots have no need to go deep in search of water. Deep roots protect the plant in times of extreme weather. I could go on with things like this but I am way off topic. Personally, I think that squash grow better amongst the grass and weeds. I have seen volunteer squash in the back yard do way better than in mulched beds. The plants get more shade from the grass and have blades of grass to grab on to. I have observed a much greater harvest in my English peas when grass poked through thinning mulch verses mulched beds with no grass. I have taken soil temps in various circumstances. The soil is warmest in bare soil. It can be 5-10 degrees cooler in mulched soil. In beds where there is a living mulch of weeds and grass, it can be 3-5 degrees cooler than even the mulched beds. In Texas, this is a good thing. So moral here is, I plant squash on the edge of the beds and let the squash jump over the edge and wander around in the yard. Oh yes, one more thing to note. Last fall, I planted squash close to the house, as squash tend to wilt if there get too much Texas sun. That was something that I will never do again. The garden is on the south east side of the house. Squash like to grow toward the sun, so they grew out into the rest of the garden covering everything: my fall planted root crops, bush beans peas, and my tomatoes. They ran amuck! Moral here: Do not let your squash, squash your garden. Either grow them up a trellis or do like I do and plant them on the far edge and let them grow toward the sun, in my case east, away from the rest of the plants. Bush squash will tend to grow out in shorter distances in all directions, so give them room. I hope some of this helps out.

Congratulations, Dorothy, on the ripe tomatoes and the real beginning of the flood of tomatoes that soon will follow! Tomato harvest season is my favorite season, and I like it best when it is a really long season. We've mostly been harvesting Early Girl, Chocolate Cherry, SunGold, Terenzo, Lizzano, Little Sun and some random Yellow Cherry that grew from seeds labeled JD's Special C-Tex but which clearly are not JD's Special C-Tex at all. Usually SunGold is the earliest spring-planted cherry type here, but Chocolate Cherry, Lizzano and Terenzo all beat it this year. Loving tomatoes as we do, we've enjoyed every last one of them. I know you're enjoying yours too. Our early plantings of squash and beans have paid off big-time so I'm glad I took the chance and planted them early. My cuke plants are climbing, but haven't bloomed yet. We're harvesting oodles of zucchini and yellow summer squash, and so far have seen no sign of SVBs or squash bugs. Knock on wood! The lack of rainfall worries me too, and we're starting to have little grassfires popping up here and there, which worries me even more. Fires are about the last thing in the world that are a concern for us here in May of most every year. Our relative humidity is dropping into the 20s in the afternoons, but I prefer that to the kind of humidity we had in previous weeks. Our high temps continue to overachieve, and I don't like that. Our forecast yesterday was for 86 and we hit 91 at our house. Today's forecast is for 88 and we're already at 87. We have a slim chance of rain next week. I think it is a 20% chance one day and a 30% chance the next, but that's still a few days out and I'm not holding my breath waiting for rain to fall. Our broccoli crop was better than our sugar snap pea crop, but neither was great and I feel like the space I used for them was wasted space. The cabbage is OK. I think the onions, potatoes and carrots will be just fine. So, it looks like this year was pretty hard on most above-ground cool-season crops, but not so rough on the cool-season crops whose edible parts grow below the ground. That means I will think long and hard about how much space I devote to cool-season crops next year. At a grassfire about 5 miles south of us yesterday, I saw bazillions of grasshoppers about 3/4" long. I was not happy to see them. They were all over every single blade of prairie grass. Seeing them sent a chill up my spine. I have not seen them here near our house in large numbers, but knowing they are present in large numbers just a few miles away sets off alarm bells ringing in my head. I hope they were present in such large numbers because they were fleeing the fire, but they really weren't moving very much, so I think they may not have been fleeing...just sitting around eating grass while the fire burned a few yards away. I have seen all kinds of bugs this year that I usually don't see, and the potato bugs are entertaining us as they creep around the garden looking for potatoes. I've seen potato bugs on tomatoes, peppers, catnip, snap peas, broccoli and now on the zucchini. They clearly must have emerged from last year's potato beds, but this year's potatoes are growing about 150' away and they can't find them. Of course, I squish the CPBs when I find them. Our "Early Sunglow" corn is participating in the trend towards early harvesting. We usually harvest it right around Memorial Day, but I think it likely will be ready to harvest next week. The coons have been prowling around the yard and garden at night, and if that is not a sign the corn is almost ripe, then I don't know what it. Dawn

Zach, I've grown the green zebras before, and just like a purple tomato tastes different than red tomato tastes different than a yellow tomato... the green ones taste different as well. I seem to remember not being overly crazy about the flavor, but then maybe we were picking them before they really were ripe? All I know is it was difficult for the "other" (AHEM!) harvesters to know when they were ripe, so likely we were getting some "green tomatoes aren't supposed to be THAT green" in our kitchen. I do recall that they grew well but weren't as prolific as some of the other varieties that we grow. You should try them, so that you can decide for yourself if you like them!