Fruit, veggies, chocolate…you’ve got it covered! Yum!

I still have 14 inches of white stuff on the ground and my pipes froze while I was away from home sick.

Squash grow surprisingly fast! We had a zucchini plant a few years ago that I planted along with the slow-growers in January to make *sure* that we had something sprout, anyway (my other seeds were very risky and I would be very sad if nothing sprouts) and he sprouted immediately and kept growing. He grew out of his 8oz yogurt pot. He grew out of the next up, a 4″ pot. He grew out of the milk-gallon-jug-cut-in-half. He grew out of the giant cracked plastic pitcher (it broke in a move, and fortunately we hadn’t figured out how to recycle it yet). By the time he grew out of the pitcher, though, it was just *barely* mostly warm enough that he had good odds of surviving outside, which he did (he remained ornamental rather than productive to the end of his days, though; too much early cooing and coddling? bad year for zucchinis? who knows).

However, it sounds like where you are, you could probably drop a reasonably durable squash plant in the ground more or less whenever outside of the absolute coldest part of winter, once the plant has gotten large enough to be a little less squirrel-snack-y, so you won’t have the “what bigger thing do we *have*? It’s still hitting 20F at night, we can’t put him outside without any protection yet…” question. 🙂

I hope your itty bitty tomato seedlings thrive beautifully for you! (I have no worries about the squash.)