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Must be Thomas his. Beautiful Laura! I have noticed in my cow manure experiment that a deep layer doesn’t work. They’ll grow in quite fresh manure of ten cm deep. In deeper they die. If you want i can bring some of those seeds to Croatia, they’re adapted to 2 seasons of manure growing.
You plant your squash in fresh manure? As in, the farmer takes it out from the stable, dumps it in the field and then you plant in it?
My manure was put out in fall/ early winter, so it broke down a lot until planting. I guess the mound is about 30 cm high…
I would be very interested in exchanging genetics, maybe I can already bring some 2025 seeds to croatia.
a young farmer tried to be nice, he brought ten tons and dumped it. Like yours it was mixed with straw or hay bedding. Some was fresher than others. But in really fresh cowdung only courgettes will work for me. I have my old farmer dump that in front of the hoophouse and grow my courgettes in it. Then come autumn i move it into the hoophouse and grow rucula/lettuce and so on in there. It gets colonized by a mycelium of an edible mushroom. Like this one.
Mine is second year this year, from a gigantic heap with the same end result… Will mostly only really grow on 10 cm deepish edge in that case. Some watermelon worked ok ish on top there. But then @ThomasPicard had send me a ridiculous diverse selection of Maxima,Moschata and watermelons. They all started great, but when heat struck in summer the roots got too warm probably. Always nice to exchange seeds!
Laura, i went out to get early compost maxima’s yesterday and found this banana-like cross. It was still very unripe, that’s a big shame, but i’ll bring thoses seeds anyway. It weighed 7 kilo and the big one of 12 kilo is maybe not so special, but it will contain seeds which are a lot riper, because i’ve been eyeballing since 2 month i think as the first one that managed to make a fruit.
I’ll bring the premature seeds of banana-like and big early to Croatia for you.
You didn’t leave much stem to judge ripeness from, but it looks like it has some scarring, similarly to the one in the middle. Then seeds and the fruit should be ripe. Also that shade of orange looks more like ripe colour. Naturally green will take months to turn wholly orange and it’s has nothing to do with ripening. It’s same as autumn leaves, it just means the skin is dead then. For eating quality, the one on the top would need couple weeks inside for sweetness to develop.
Funny how I only get around to answering you now that we have seen each other and are already at home again! Your cross looks a little like this fruit that appeared among my squashes.
No idea where it came from, but the resemblance is striking, don’t you agree? Mine is small, probably about 2 kgs…I am not sure if I got squash from you in the serendipity seed swap 2024…then I put seed from me into the swap. But I certainly sowed seed I got through the swap this year…So either you got seed from me or I got seed from you or it is just similar looking and not from the same source at all…Doesn’t narrow it down that much, does it 
Additionally, I came home and of course went straight to my squashes. Bad news: Blue Banana is definitely crossed of the list off varieties I want to work with: I got 4 fruit. Of these, 2!! managed to rot in the last week in Storage. I mainly write this here to remind myself to not save seeds from the remaining 2. Sad, because I was quite enamored with the color and the shape….
