Call me a Rebel--spaghetti squash / zucchini crosses

Adaptation Projects Cucurbits
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That sounds fun! I’ll let you know if I see it in there!

Man. I’m sorry to hear you’re not getting pollinators. I imagine they’ll show up eventually, but it could take them awhile (like, maybe even years) to notice you’re consistently growing their favorite plants. Do you have habitats for solitary bees?

I checked online, and it looks like squash bees like to nest in bare earth near cucurbit patches. Do you have any little spaces of bare earth where they could burrow down into to sleep? Maybe if you only mulched 99% of the ground and left a few small bare spaces, it would help attract the bees that specialize in cucurbit pollinating.

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Ground nesting bees are a concern. This whole place was closely mowed grass until this spring, surrounded by wheat, corn, and soy, and I doubt there’s a garden within half a mile. Probably farther, but at least.

It will take a while for the pollinators to find out there’s a food source here. The summer bloomers in my pollinator garden are taking hold as the spring bloomers die back, so if they come they’ll have an enduring food source.

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How long have you been gardening in your current location? I see you are in Kansas. There’s no place like Kansas. My great grandfather claimed to have met Dorthy from the Wizard of Oz. He said she baked him a pie. My great grandfather, who has passed a long time ago, was probably kidding, not sure.

Anyways, I hope the following helps. My first year, I missed a lot of pollination because not many bugs around and I had no idea you could hand pollenate stuff. My second year, the pollinator activity multiplied by many factors. This year, my third year of gardening, the number of pollinators is high. Pollinators is not my limiting factor right now. Currently, the consistency high temps are my limiting factor. Nothing in my garden seems to appreciate the beauty of 90 + degrees every single day except for the okra. They are very happy. I can almost feel their joy when I walk by them.

Anyways, if you are in this forum, chances are you are very well read and have already picked up on the tricks that I have been doing. The main thing I have been doing is, the last two seasons, I have grown a big wild flower garden within my garden. Second, I don’t use any insecticides of any form. I also pile sticks and grass clippings, etc near the garden to promote crickets. Nothing like the sound of crickets and frogs on a rainy night.

Here’s a project I will be working on soon to further boost the bug population:

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I only bought my current property last October. I’ve been in Kansas just over a year.

One of the first things I did this spring was start a pollinator garden over the septic field. That’s where I saw my single bee this spring. Mostly perennials. There will eventually be flowers in the perennial sections of my garden, but right now I have other priorities.

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Since melons are a nice thing but nit vital, I left them alone to see what happens. They are getting pollinated, and I saw a native bee in one. I didn’t get close enough to see what kind.

I’ll continue to hand-pollinate the squash until I start to see bees over there.

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My f1 was mostly killed by squash bugs. I got one pumpetti and one zucchetti. F2 brushed off the squash bugs and matured quickly, but that was an unexpected bonus. I figured I might get slow maturity but high productivity. Instead I got quick AND productive. I think I got 12 ripe zucchetti before I started using them as summer squash. The pumpetti ripened quickly but ripened late and didn’t have the productivity of the zucchetti.

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My impatience won over my common sense. I opened up the tatume x zuc x spaghetti.

It has the flavor of the zucchini, strings of the spaghetti. I’ve never tried tatume before so I can’t compare on that aspect, but it’s crunchier than zucchini. It would definitely work raw for veggie dips and that kind of thing.

Got a good number of seeds that appear fully ripe. Probably twice that number that might have been ripe if I’d left it alone for even a month…

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I’ll cook it for dinner tonight and report back.

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Wow, that many mature seeds when it was harvested so quickly and left to sit for such a short time! I wouldn’t have expected that at all. Really neat.

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It’s definitely not the smooth mushy texture of cooked zucchini. It has a good crunch to it. It is stranding but the strands are very short. That may just be because of how I treated it.

The flavor is very zucchini. I think this one could be bred back into the ss to reinforce the mix. It’s good, a definite improvement over straight zucchini, but not stellar.

So good raw and baked. Next one from this plant I’ll keep as a winter squash.

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Cool! I’m glad it’s a good squash. And I hope you’ll find some that are spectacular!

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One more blossom on that vine that I’ll pollinate tomorrow using the pure ss. Two more fruits maturing on other plants.

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Looks like it might be another tatume?

The vining type seems to be dominating this year. The bush varieties are getting all the bacterial wilt, squash bugs, etc.

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I found someone else who is doing the zucchetti, and she’s running into the same patterns–fast maturity to a large size, high production in the f2. She’s in Canada, so trading seeds becomes an issue, but the combination of zucchini and spaghetti squash appears to be creating very similar results from everyone who tries it.

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Nice! Maybe there are a lot of genetic differences between them, and that results in great hybrid vigor, or something.

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Wow, I learned so much from this thread (and also feel overwhelmed LOL)! Thanks @UnicornEmily, you’re a rockstar!

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@UnicornEmily, can you please share what your method is for labeling and tracking these squashes and their seed so you know what you’re planting for the following year?

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My method is, well . . . pretty slapdash. (Laugh.) I generally remember which plants I want to save seeds from, so I don’t bother to mark them.

If you want to be more organized about it, especially if you share a garden with other people who can’t read your mind, you might use pieces of string or ribbon to tie a little bow around the stems of your favorite fruits (or plants) you want to save seeds from. A lot of people do something along those lines.

I tend to harvest the seeds from each fruit individually and put them into separate bags, with a finicky, detailed description of what I remember about the fruit and the plant it came from. Every squash fruit gets a separate bag.

The next year, when it comes time for planting, I go through all those bags, carefully decide precisely how many seeds I want from each bag, plonk that many into a tupperware, and head out to the garden, where I sow them all randomly. (Laugh.)

That’s when I’m at my most precise. When I don’t feel like being precise at all, I stick all the seeds from fruits I like of a particular species into a mini tupperware together, label it with the species, and stick it in my seed box. When it comes time for planting, I just pull out a handful of seeds and go strew them around randomly.

In more general terms, here’s how I organize my whole seed box.

I have separate large bags for separate growing conditions. Each species gets its own bag inside there. I believe these are all the large bags I have currently:

  • Drought tolerant summer annuals.
  • Not drought tolerant summer annuals.
  • Drought tolerant biennials.
  • Not drought tolerant biennials.
  • Drought tolerant perennials.
  • Not drought tolerant perennials.
  • Drought tolerant tropicals.
  • Not drought tolerant tropicals.
  • Winter annuals.
  • Winter perennials. (This is my personal term for a perennial that grows in the winter and is dormant in summer, like garlic or tulips.)

I mostly separate biennials from perennials because I’m pedantic and like using the right words for things.

I don’t care in the slightest if my plants that grow actively during the winter and are either dead or dormant in summer (peas, fava beans, lettuce, garlic, tulips, etc.) are drought tolerant or not, because winter is my rainy season. So I make no distinction there.

I put tropical annuals with summer annuals. The only species I label “tropical” are ones that absolutely have to survive my zone 7b winters in order to give me a harvest. I’m not at all in a tropical climate, but I have a new greenhouse and I’m very optimistic, so . . . (laugh).

I care immensely about the drought tolerance of anything that needs to grow during the summer. My summers are very, very hot and very, very dry, so the only things I consider “drought tolerant” are things that can survive three or four months without being watered at all in 100 degree weather. If it can only survive a week without being watered, pfffffffff, that goes in the “not drought tolerant” bag. This includes all my squashes, even the ones that can survive a whole month without being watered.

I’ve found sorting species by growing conditions is very convenient. That way, if I have an open spot in the garden, I can pull out the relevant bag and look through it for ideas of what would suit that space.

Then I’ll decide how many seeds I want of each species, plonk them all into a tupperware, record the list of everything in that tupperware into a spreadsheet with exactly where I’m going to put them, go outside, and plant them all in that area, with no regard to what species is where in that area.

I’m both extremely precise and extremely messy. Can you tell? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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