Professor Porcupine gave some practical advice a month or two ago about the wild vines. And in fact, I did take a taste of the first fruit from every wild plant. I do recall that there was maybe a vine without fruit. Or I made a mistake.
What I’m getting at is that I discovered a nonbitter plant in the wild egg gourd area when I injured my knee and accidentally stepped on one of its fruits.
The very frustrating thing is that I have been manually crossing this vine with domestic varieties. And so while I would like to have a pure, self-pollinated fruit, at this late stage in the season there is no time to do that outdoors.
Therefore I have tried to get half of the vine to form new roots. Two weeks later I cut it in half. And today because of the forecast frost, I brought the two pieces indoors, one half that includes the original roots, and one half that includes whatever roots may have formed after two weeks with the vine buried.
I would really like to self pollinate this one, and I’m going to be quite frustrated if today’s move indoors isn’t enough to keep it alive and producing fruit.
After this discovery, I did taste one fruit from each of the remaining wild vines to see if any of those were non-bitter. They were not. This somewhat significantly reduced my supply of manually cross pollinated egg guard fruit, but I don’t regret doing it. I needed to understand what was going on. I could swear that there are two different levels of bitterness from different plants I tasted. Both far too bitter to enjoy, but one that was significantly more bitter than the other. Food for thought.
Interesting, so an edible Egg shaped pepo squash variety already exists!? Wow, doesn’t that just help speedrun your breeding efforts ha. Interestingly seeds are from Turkey? So maybe they were introduced a long time ago & had selection pressure for the egg shape? IDK how closley related they are, we probably need to see the fully mature fruit but it does look somewhat close.
Interesting! I’m so glad you found non bitter fruit this early! Was the entire fruit non-bitter? What about the seed strings? I’ve noticed even some grocery store maxima squash have bitter seed strings but non-bitter flesh. Since nobody I know licks each seed to taste the seed strings, I’ve found out that the Bitter-Strings trait translates into flowers with bitter center parts. Did you notice any bitterness in the flowers or leaves?
It probably will have enough energy to finish ripening the fruits already on the vine (It can even do that off the vine, if fruits are somewhat mature enough). If the plant flowers, I’d recommend you save & freeze the pollen at the very least before the plant has a chance to die. That way even if the plant doesn’t make any more seeds, you can use the frozen pollen to pollinate next years crops!
That’s a positive! I remember the loss of bitterness was a chance mutation, at first it was the edible seeds that were selected, then followed the flesh. Perhaps something similar is going on again. I wonder, is it purely genetic or is the enviroment/growing conditions affecting the way the same bitterness gene gets expressed? That’s not a thing is it?
These are my selections from the first and second generation crosses with Alpha. Some are back crosses and some are new crosses. Probably too many crosses for me to keep up with next year. The seeds in all of these fruit are related to one another. It is a grex in the classical sense of the term.
This photo shows a new egg gourd acquisition next to the two varieties I’ve used for the initial crosses: my ‘irregular’ shaped patty pans and the Desi squash.
I have a more morphologically consistent pattypan variety that I don’t think runs as true to the ovifera subspecies type. The large patty pan squashes in the wider angle photo are from this less intriguing pattypan lineage.
Edit: there is some discoloration on certain fruits where I let them get a bit frosty. They are normally the same solid white as their siblings.
Ah so that’s what happens to squash fruits during frost, good to know. Doesn’t it damage their storabiltiy tho?
Please do let use know how each fruit tasted, like what you found or noticed. Especially the bitter tastes like the Bitter seed-strings, Bitter flesh, Bitter seeds, bitter skin, ect.
