(Nods.) Well, I imagine it would be much easier to dry farm them in your new climate.
How much rainfall does your new place get in the summer?
30+ inches, although people still complain about drought. It’s all in what you’re used to. My favorite was a youtuber in Michigan (I think) who thought his potatoes were going to die because they’d had no rain for a week. 
One week? Oh, that poor gardener! (Snorts with laughter.)
Yeah, it’s definitely all what you’re used to. I bet Arizonans hear people in New England complaining about 90 degree temperatures and shake their heads and go, “90 degrees is comfortable. It’s not hot until it hits over 110 degrees!”
Thing is, it really is valid, both for humans and for plants, because you adapt to what you’re used to.
I mean, for instance, Hong Kong gets hit by a typhoon 10 approximately every three years. I was there for two of them in the seven years I was there. No big deal. You obviously can’t leave your home for any reason, and everything is closed including the airport, and I bet it really, really, really, really stinks to be homeless during one of those, and there are landslides all over the place, but the infrastructure stays fine. The city was built specifically to withstand those.
Meanwhile, a tropical storm of the same size leveled New Orleans. The city was not built to withstand those.
“What you’re used to” definitely matters!
Ohio. No hurricanes. No earthquakes. No alligators. 
There is a UK gardener on YouTube that did a video on his no watering potatoes in tubs. He had some health problems etc and basically planted them and then only had a week of upkeep then nothing til he dumped them to harvest.
He was very click-baity and… scripted, I guess, like it came across weird. But ya I was like wow… man in UK with super regular rain grows potatoes from tubers in huge tubs full of high quality soil and compost… oohhh sooo cool… 
Ohio sounds great! (Grin.)
I expect there to be a catastrophic earthquake in my area sometime soon. We’re on a fault line that hasn’t done much in over a century. The Utah state government has been warning for a long time to expect something huge.
I’ve done my best to earthquake-proof my food storage and other things, and we’ve made sure we know where the gas shutoff valve is. I often find myself wondering how much a giant earthquake will affect my fruit trees.
But when it comes down to it, you have to just move forward, you know? It might happen in two months. It might happen in twenty years. I have no way of knowing. So I’m just doing whatever I can, and trusting God to do whatever he knows is best.
(Laugh.) Yeah, growing potatoes in the UK in loads of lovely compost with no irrigation . . . sounds like such a challenge! 
I was stoked when I found out that squashes are native to my desert. I figured that was probably why they seem to do so well here. That’s one of the reasons I want to see how well I can get away with deep mulching and dry farming them. In theory, I think they should be able to do well.
I’m thinking about goals for this cross. I prefer bush form just because they seem to produce more, but I’ll include vining squashes if they produce two or more fruits early in the season. I want to encourage the early production and early blooming. High production and quick ripening.
Taste, of course, but so far that hasn’t been an issue. I’ve liked each one I tried, both as summer and winter squash.
I don’t care one way or the other about the spaghetti aspect but I see no reason to select against it.
Secondary goals, that can be selected for at the same time, are heat and cold tolerance, drought tolerance, and insect resistance.
I had initially expected the pumpetti and zucchetti to cross, but that does not seem to be happening. I don’t remember why I included the pumpkin in the first place. Maybe just because it was there?
I wonder if picking immature squash and letting them ripen off the vine would also encourage earlier fruiting?
I’m wondering if picking immature squash and having them ripen off the plant will encourage more prolific fruiting, while not sacrificing viable seeds or winter squash taste. It certainly worked (by accident!) for me this year, which implies I can keep doing it with that species.
Do you enjoy having multiple flavors available with your zucchetti and pumpetti? If so, that’s a great reason to keep growing both of them.
My goals for my spaghetti zucchinis are, more or less:
- Yummy flavor that I don’t get tired of eating every day for months on end. Various different yummy flavors are even better and more likely to meet this.
- Texture that enjoy. I find I really like and prefer the bumpy texture of mild strings in my summer squashes. I may find other textures I like better later. Anything I like is welcome.
- Long shelf life. This is important in case I do get tired of eating them for awhile, so I can take a break without them rotting. It’s also important to be able to store them through the winter months when I can’t grow new ones.
- High productivity in a small space. Bush form definitely seems better for this. (Healthy plants goes along with this, so I won’t count it as separate.)
- Thornlessness.
- Powdery mildew resistance. My pepos consistently get powdery mildew after our only significant summer rain, which is a weeklong downpour in mid-August. There are two more rainless hot months after that – the rest of August, all of September, and half of October – so if they can shrug off powdery mildew, that’s two more months of high productivity.
- Extreme drought tolerance.
- Greater cold tolerance. (Parthenocarpy may be a useful trait to go along with this, because a cold tolerant, parthenocarpic squash can keep producing under a hoop house when it’s too cold for pollinators.)
Since I already have goals #1-4, I’ll be working on goals #5-8 this year.
To accomplish #5 and #6, I bought a thornless, powdery mildew resistant zucchini called Spineless Perfection from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. As long as it tastes at least good, I will try hand-pollinating crosses with it and everything I love the flavor of. I’ll also probably self-pollinate it, just to make sure I have a few hundred more seeds to work with, so I don’t have to buy it again to make crosses in future generations.
#7 and #8 I’ll be selecting for lightly, mainly by oversowing everything I have plenty of seeds of, and letting the environment thin out the ones that can’t hack it.
I’m very happy with my spaghetti zucchinis right now, and I know I can be happier. Tatume was the most delicious summer squash I grew last year, and it had a vining habit and nasty thorns. I’d love to have spaghetti zucchinis with the flavor of Tatume, as well as spaghetti zucchinis with that tasty honey/yellow squash flavor.
I’ve also bought a bunch of other varieties of pepo summer squashes that look tasty, and I’ll be evaluating lots of them alongside my spaghetti zucchinis this year.
I accidentally ended up with a yellow summer squash in my spag x zuc population.
It produced only one squash, which I kid you not took two months to maturity. And it was the first squash to start rotting.
I kept a few seeds but yanked the plant. It came from the zucchini line so it must have crossed the previous year. Anything with blossoms in that shape will be watched very carefully.
Oy, that sounds terrible!
Update!
I still have four of the July harvest in my closet. They’re still hard as a rock. Every three weeks to a month, I open up another one. They’re all great. Still tasty. Still hard as a rock. Still no signs of rotting. It’s been eight months since I harvested them now.
Two days ago, I decided to open one of the ones I harvested in October. I chose the least promising one: it was very soft and had a thin rind, the rind was still green, and it was the smallest. It also had a big old scrape that had healed over on the side. Because it felt soft, I figured it had probably gone bad.
I cut it open, with some trepidation. It looked . . .
. . . perfect.
I tried some. It tasted perfect, too!
The rind was thin and easy to cut. It felt and tasted like a summer squash, not like a winter squash, except that it had viable seeds inside. And it’s been sitting around in a box on my floor for four months now.
I ate it for dinner. Yum. Worked out great.
It’s February, and I just ate a fresh zucchini that tasted like it had just come off the plant.
Whatever genetics I’ve got in these plants are fantastic!
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Okay! It’s May 15th. Some of the fruits are now molding. That means some of the fruits (not all of them) have a limit of a six month shelf life. That’s still very good for pepos.
Here is what I had sitting on shelves by October 15th:
- 40-50 spaghetti zucchinis harvested immature in October, most of them having spent a week or two on the plant. About half were a foot long, and half were two feet long.
- 13 spaghetti zucchinis harvested immature in July, all of them having spent about two weeks on the plant. All were about two feet long.
- 8 spaghetti pattypans (?) from a single plant that had a different phenotype from all the rest. They weren’t very tasty as summer squash, so I let the rest grow into winter squash, hoping they’d be delicious as winter squash. They weren’t. They were okay, but since everything else is better, I’m not saving any of their seeds.
- 1 definite spaghetti pattypan cross with a different phenotype. It was the smallest plant that survived, and eked out just one tiny fruit. However, that one fruit was a yummy winter squash, and it did produce that fruit in full shade. I saved its seeds, and I may plant them someday.
- 3 purebreed spaghettis from three different plants. Each managed one mature fruit each, and the fruits were only eight inches to a foot long. The purebred 2021 spaghettis were vigorous and each grew four one-to-two-foot-long fruits each. The biggest was almost three feet long. I’m pretty sure the difference is that the ones in 2021 were grown in full sun, and their children in 2022 were grown in full shade. Given that the fruits were the tastiest and they took up no extra space in my garden because they grew underneath the giant spaghetti zucchinis, their seeds are going to be replanted this year.
I’ve eaten a lot of them, but not all. I was planning to finish the last of them in May, but sheesh, I’m not even close to done yet. There are just so many!
Here is what I have left:
- Spaghetti zucchinis that I harvested in October: 12. (Another 8 started to mold this month, so they’re now in the compost pile.)
- Spaghetti pattypans (?): 3. (Another 1 started to mold this month, and is now in the compost pile.)
- Spaghetti zucchinis that I harvested in July: 3.
- Purebreed spaghettis: 1.
My plan is to save the July spaghetti zucchinis and the last purebreed spaghetti to eat last. Which, at the rate I seem to be eating these fruits, will likely be in July.
If they are capable of sitting on a shelf until I have brand new summer squashes coming in . . .
Well, that seems like pretty great shelf life, I think!
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I planted mine in the ground along the edge of the woodchip piles in early April. 26 plants germinated, 21 are left. All have secondary leaves but some are visibly weaker.
So far the chickens haven’t been over there.
I planted the main section with all the seeds jumbled up, 4 inches apart, but a big section never germinated, including the section of pure spaghetti.
The first year at this location is about adaptation, so I am planting everything thickly.
I’ve got the spaghetti zuccs planted out last week, still waiting on them sprouting. I did 5 or 6 bunches where i’ll pick the best 1 or 2 plants per bunch to grow out.
Still 21 plants, but only two are looking really strong. The others are yellow, so I took a chance that the problem is not too much water and gave them a little nitrogen this morning.
Six are flowering, but tiny flowers and only male flowers so far. I’m thinking I’ll replant this week, a second row a foot from the first but leave the originals in the ground.
One of the pure spaghetti squash is up. Apparently it got buried, so it was strong enough to push through 6 inches of woodchips. If it thrives I’ll use it as the primary female parent and cross back the others to reinforce the mix.
Awesome! Any seedling strong enough to push through six inches of wood chips is a seedling that can be dry farmed more easily.
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Emily, I think this must be from one of your seeds. I only used the one type of zucchini as a cross, so all of mine were striped at this stage. Most of the other plants are really struggling with the waterlogged soil, but this one doesn’t care.
Only problem is I had to self pollinate it because none of the other plants had ripe male blossoms yet. It’s a vining type.
I hope it’s really proliffic!
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Wonderful news! Yep, that looks like one of my spaghetti zucchinis, all right! The shape is fatter than the F1 generation I grew last year. Those were much fatter than the Black Beauty zucchinis I grew in 2021. It looks like it’s expressing zucchini genes for color (the spaghetti squashes were much lighter green when immature), and spaghetti genes for shape.
If it’s vining, that means it’s also expressing its spaghetti genes for that. My suspicion is that it may have more spaghetti genes than zucchini! If so, that’s great, because the spaghetti squashes I grew in 2021 were probably the source of most of the greatness of my spaghetti zucchinis.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s good at tolerating waterlogged soil. I had three incidents last year in which I completely forgot I left the water turned on, and discovered the soaker hoses still going at full blast twelve hours later. Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! (Why yes, that did make my water bill $100 higher that month. 
)
Each time I accidentally did that, I refused to water at all for about two weeks afterwards. Some of the other pepos croaked. The spaghetti zucchinis didn’t even seem to notice.
I planted the seeds about two inches apart, and the survivors wound up roughly about one to two feet apart. They were all tangled up in a jungle in about a 10 x 10 foot space. I think at the end, there were 8 spaghetti zucchinis, 1 tatume, 3 spaghettis, and 1 spaghetti pattypan. They all got their seeds saved.
Oh, and there was also 1 spaghetti pattypan maybe, but the fruits had a weak shelf life (about three months) and a thoroughly meh taste, so I didn’t save any seeds from them. Really a shame, because it had a moderately small vine (perfectly manageable in a small bed) and gave me 10 winter squashes. It was also the earliest to set fruit. But with the worst taste and worst shelf life, nah, not worth saving those seeds.
Especially since the spaghetti zucchinis were just as productive and started setting fruit only a few days later, and the fruits were three times the size, on top of it.
When yours start to produce I’d like to see pictures. This is part of my harvest from 2021. You mentioned you liked the more slender shape so they stack better.
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I wonder why you’re throwing out fruits that lasted 11 months? Because you didn’t get a chance to taste them? Some of those you ate previously might have rotted if they hadn’t been eaten earlier, so I’m curious as to your reasoning.