Didn’t see a topic for Pepo for this year, so I created one (I apologize if this is duplicate).
I planted a lot of the offspring of last year’s Zeus earlier as it didn’t seem like there would be a late frost. And, of course, a day after the official last day of frost, the temperature briefly dipped too low.
On many of the seedlings, the first true leaf was damaged or destroyed:
I sowed my zucchini seeds on April 15th and here they are now! I have some ‘dark star’ dryfarmed zucchini in the first picture. I will cover some dark star female flowers and manually pollinate em to avoid crossing, saving seed separately to keep the trait strong and reincorporate in the years to come. Otherwise the rest will cross freely with the gts zucchini and hopefully introduce that capability into the offspring.
now THAT’S cool. I wonder what the flavour profile will be like, if it’ll be dull or insignificant because of being grown for pig feed. Or if the plants will produce extra giant fruits to accommodate the pig appetites!
They are pretty bland(not at all bitter but also not sweet). The fruits are medium sized and ripen pretty quickly. The plants are very vigorous and fast growing(the plants in the image are from seeds sown ~28 days ago) but they have lots of male flowers and very few or no(!) female flowers(this is typical for old landraces because it increases the likelihood to pass on their genes without investing energy into fruit).
Because these are probably fully resistant to powdery mildew I’m planning on hybridizing them with bush zucchini to get a more compact version with more female flowers
That’s only 28 days of growth? Wow! :o
I can see why you are hybridizing them with some bush zucchini. Grow fast and resistant to powdery mildew is pretty sweet. Hope you are able to get enough fruit from em if you are dealing with so many male flowers! Ive seen people stuff the male flowers woth cheese and dip em in a batter to fry em but havent tried it myself yet.
