Hi everyone. This is our second year participating in the farmer stewardship programme and we’re excited to take some of our adaptive populations through to the next stage of their evolutionary journey! Apologies it’s taken me a while to post here, it’s been a very challenging season but I’m glad to finally offer some updates on our crops.
This year we’re continuing to grow our Cucurbita maxima flock, originally started when I was working at Oxton Organics in Worcestershire, UK, with my friend Jayne. I brought this flock up to Scotland with me when I moved here last year and last season was its first experience of a Scottish summer! It produced surprisingly well, and we have continued with this project this year hoping for slightly higher yields. As usual we had super high germination rates and seedling vigour on this squash. We are growing our main seed crop in quite a windy exposed field on the other side of the estate. We’re just a mile from the coast here so these squash are getting everything a dry windy Fife summer can throw at them! They are coping surprisingly well with the drought - it’s been a really really dry summer here, with almost drought conditions and we’ve had ongoing issues with irrigation from our borehole so these squash are really being tested. There are fruit forming and setting on all of the plants, some plants are definitely coping with the extremes better than others, but we’re hoping for a decent yield. I have been selecting this population for size (to fit into a veg bag for our CSA) and for flavour for several years and will continue with this selection criteria this autumn. We also trialled direct seeding a row of squash in the market garden, these wont be saved for seed as they’re not isolated from other maxima, but it’s been amazing to see how well these germinated and caught up with transplanted squash nearby. These will be to use in our CSA and we’ll be documenting yield per bed on these.
The second adaptive population is a Cucurbita moschata flock that again I started a few years ago but down south, and it has been moved to Scotland in the hope the diverse genetics in the flock can help it adapt to our short season. Last year we only got a handful on fruit ripen and barely any viable seed, so we’ll see how this crop fares this season. We have some fruit set so far but our season is quite short here so jury’s out on whether it’ll ripen in time. I did read an interesting thing about day length with Cucurbita moschata - that some older varieties don’t set fruit when daylight hours are long, and would be keen to hear folks thoughts or experience of that? We are 56.24 degree North here, its light for +16 hours a day in midsummer so I am wondering if this might influence our ability to get viable seed, or hopefully the diversity of genetics might help us select against this…?
The third crop is another squash, Cucurbita pepo, but a summer squash population. East Neuk Market Garden participated in the first grow out of this diverse population back in 2024 through the Seed Sovereignty Programme Crowd Breeding Project, but we couldn’t justify giving over space to it last year as it wasn’t hugely productive and space is precious on the farm as we have a 160 member CSA scheme. The Farmer Stewardship grant has allowed us to pick up this exciting population again, as it’s now in year 3 of crossing. It’s been incredible to see the vigour and health of the plants, and the diversity of the fruit! about 8 varieties (including an F1!!) were combined in the original grex, and it’s been grown by several other farmers across the UK for the past couple of years. We did a tasting of some young fruit at the weekend as flavour is a key trait we’re looking for. All were delicious apart from one plant, the offending fruit is in a photo below. It was inedibly bitter!
I would love some advice on this, there is a lot of conflicting information out there on bitterness in squash. The fruit wasn’t particularly mature but also not super young. We have removed the plant from the population now, but some of its pollen will inevitably have gotten into the flock by now. If we removed all the flowers and fruit and started again we might not get fruit to maturity at this point in the season so I think we might have to risk it. I have flagged the neighbouring plants to save separately as I felt they’d be most likely to have crossed with the bitter culprit! If anyone has experience of bitterness occurring in crossed up populations I’d love to hear about it. I am hoping it’s environmental - we’ve had such a dry summer as I mentioned, but interesting that none of the other fruits from other plants displayed any bitterness. It was also the only fruit that looked more like a courgette than a summer squash.
