Hello, winter squash growers! This is the place to share your C. maxima journey in 2026. This year, Going to Seed offered a kabocha mix and ‘The Other Ones’ mix. If you are planting one or both mixes, we’d like to know how they do, too.
As always, we encourage you to keep the healthiest plants and share seeds from your best-tasting fruits with your community and/or Going to Seed. The more returns we get each year, the more diverse and resilient our seed mixes will become, helping new growers establish adapted plants in their gardens.
The attached zine was customized for the Salt Lake City, UT area, but there is general information that may be useful to you. Thanks for being a part of this community.
This is my second year growing an adaptive gardening style grex of maxima squash. I started with this maxima mash-up from @wilddreamsfarm plus some additional Lower Salmon River and Kabocha seeds and got a very limited harvest due to overcrowding and choosing not to irrigate much.
I saved seeds from all the squash that had good to excellent tasting flesh (3 out of these 5), and planted those out this year alongside seeds from an exceptional tasting squash from my local coop and a few varieties collected at local seed swaps and from the serendipity seed swap box.
I direct seeded ~10 seeds from the same mother squash or outside source in each spot I wanted a plant and culled the seedlings for vigor 2-3 times depending on how quickly they showed differences. It was gratifying to see that across the board the best plants from the 3 squash grown in my garden have done better than all the imported seeds, and are significantly ahead of where they were last year.
My best vines are ~3 feet long and preparing their first female flowers. I’ve also noticed that the best plants are all extremely hairy, which I believe contributes to pest resistance and may make them more effective at supporting endophytic bacteria.
