2021
The first year seemed like it went so well. I’d planted several types of squash (c maxima) on my richest south-facing slope. The pigs had overwintered in there, it had been tilled, and it was the warmest microclimate in my Northern BC property where the only squash you could ripen outdoors was, occasionally, (ugh) spaghetti squash. I do not like spaghetti squash and I didn’t have money to devote to a greenhouse, so I did a variety trial.
I was expecting to get crossing and save seeds from this first year. I wasn’t sure what I’d get to ripen, but I didn’t expect much. The varieties I chose, I chose based on three factors: earliness (my whole season is roughly 90 days), storage quality, and flavour/texture (I like flaky kabocha types and I strongly dislike spaghetti squash). No variety had to have all of these, but they had to impress me with at least one.
I planted the following:
Algonquin pumpkin/Heritage Harvest Seeds
Blue kuri/Adaptive Seeds
Burgess buttercup/Heritage Harvest Seeds
Candystick dessert delicata/Adaptive Seeds (yes, this is a pepo so it wouldn’t cross, I was just curious)
Gold nugget/Heritage Harvest Seeds (I had grown this previously with some success, it’s very very short season but tiny and not flavourful)
Little gem red kuri/Adaptive Seeds
Lofthouse landrace/Experimental Farm Network (I suspect this was actually Lofthouse Buttercup based on how they turned out)
Lower salmon river/Annapolis Seeds
Potimarron/Adaptive Seeds (this was an old favourite of mine)
Red kuri/Annapolis Seeds
Sundream/Bird & bee (this is a dehybridized Sunshine; Sunshine is grown down the valley from me)
Sweet mama/William Dam Seed (Earliest days-to-maturity of any I found)
Winter sweet meat/Annapolis Seeds
North Georgia Candy Roaster/Heritage Harvest Seeds
Gete Oksomin/Prairie Garden Seeds
I sowed seeds indoors and transplanted outdoors in June into my heavy clay. I planted 4-6 of each type and kept them labeled, but planted them relatively close to each other for cross-pollination. I was expecting that there would be heavy selection for growth in my cool days and honestly quite cold nights, but that’s not what happened at all.
After a spring/early summer with very cool nights (generally below 10C) we had a weather phenomenon known as the “heat dome” over the summer. My area got up to the mid-thirties celsius, which is unheard of. I watered once a week, but some plants were outside where I could water died.
Several plants set and more-or-less ripened fruit which I harvested in early September, fairly typical for our area. My notes were as follows:
North Georgia Candy Roaster was the most prolific.
Red kuri and sundream were pretty good, sundream maybe a touch earlier?
Burgess buttercup had nice large squash and were good and early.
The lofthouse squash produced excellent small-sized squash that ripened ok, but not many per vine.
Gete Oksomin did several squash, I’m curious about how they cross pollinated or not with all the others.
Potimarron only did a couple but was in some shade.
Little gem did well.
Candystick delicata, algonquin pumpkin, sweet mama, and blue kuri didn’t produce but they weren’t in the main patch so who knows.
Gold nugget did great in the corn patch and produced a bunch of tiny ones.
Sweet meat produced 2 squash and I don’t know how ripe they are, we’ll see how they go. Pretty squash though.
I harvested the fruit and stored them. Pretty exciting, right?!
I wanted to store things awhile before I pulled seed out of them, to test for storage ability. I was dreaming about a landrace that combined the flavour of the fabled Lofthouse buttercups, the productivity and sprawl (I have lots of land, sprawl is good) of North Georgia Candy Roaster, the colours and texture of Kuris.
When I opened up the squash, I found no seeds.
I opened squash after squash and tasted them: the Lofthouse squash were so delicious I ate them raw.
They had husks, shells of seeds, but there was nothing inside the seeds. I was devastated. I looked around and all I could find was that maybe it had been too hot or dry for proper seed formation-- or maybe too hot and too cold both, in alternating bands.
I opened squash after squash and found no seeds over and over. It was the saddest thing.
Until, my notes read:
*I found seeds in two squash! One, Red Kuri from Annapolis seeds, was stuffed with thick super viable-seeming seeds. The other, a Burgess Buttercup from Heritage Harvest, had mostly empty seeds but there are a couple that feel like there’s something in there. Both of them were on the edge of my intermittent irrigation and outside the main patch, buried in weeds. I wonder if the pollinators stuck to the weeds? If the weeds provided a buffer for the heat/cool day/night cycle so stressed the plants less (though the plants didn’t look all that much better, honestly)? Something about irrigating with cold water?
The two I was pretty sure would give me seed because the variety always ripens here (Gold Nugget), did not, exactly; they gave me transparent pouches the shape of a seed with about 1/4 of the germ end full of a truncated-looking but plump seed. I will try and sprout them to see what happens, but it’s very weird. The opaque seed inside clear pouch is a small triangle, as if the seed had been sliced across a little bit past the germ.*
So my first variety trial ended with some frustration, but a little bit of hope, too, that maybe the handful of seeds I had were nicely crossed.
