Part 7/9:
The harvest of butternut squash turned out to be exceptional, resulting in about 150 squash this year. Similar to potatoes, they cured best at room temperature in the basement. Their storage relies on visual inspection, allowing us to prioritize which squash to consume first based on size and firmness.
For beans, we adopted the innovative pillowcase method of shelling, which dramatically reduced our previous hand-shelling hours. By filling a pillowcase with bean pods and giving it a soft whack against a hard surface, we efficiently released the beans, followed by a fan-based separation to clean the harvested product, filling five grocery bags’ worth.