Next year, I want to grow a wildly crossing pepo landrace. I’ll be planting, at last count:
The Reckless Pepo grex.
My spaghetti zucchinis.
My tatumes that probably crossed with them.
My spaghetti pattypans that probably crossed with them.
My spaghetti squashes that probably backcrossed with them.
Two thornless varieties, one of which is powdery mildew resistant.
Two parthenocarpic, mostly gynoecious varieties.
A drought tolerant zucchini that is used to being dry farmed in this area that Lauren shared with me. I’m excited about that one. Thank you, Lauren!
And some other random varieties that sound delicious and/or early.
My goal is to have squashes that taste good immature, taste good mature, are drought tolerant, and (eventually) are thornless and powdery mildew resistant. Parthenocarpy and gynoecious being common traits that pop up a lot would be nice bonuses.
That’s population number one.
Population number two will be my Candystick Dessert Delicata squashes. I’d rather they not cross with the rest.
Or rather, to be more specific . . . I’d love to have them cross with the rest, but only in one direction. (Grin.) My theory is that zucchinis won’t make delicatas more delicious, but delicatas might do wonderful things for zucchinis. I might even see if I can eventually do backcrossing to get bush delicatas with zucchini high productivity.
So, at least for now, I want to keep my delicata population separated. My current plan is to plant my delicatas as far away from the rest of the pepos as possible (which unfortunately is only about 30 feet away), with a whole bunch of melons in between, in hopes that the bees won’t carry pollen between pepo populations. Meanwhile, I’ll periodically rob the delicatas of male flowers and take them over to the main pepo patch to pollinate any open female flowers I see.
Have any of you ever done something like this? If so, how did it go?
It’s good to hear that worked! My heart fails me at the thought of trying to pick all the male flowers off the non-delicatas daily, which I’m sure would work (laugh), but I could try putting my gynoecious parthenocarpic varieties at the closest end to the delicatas, and removing the male flowers from the normal ones that are the next closest, which may help a bit.
I’m hoping that putting melons in between, which have similar flowers but won’t cross, will encourage the squash bees to visit those in between the two pepo patches, thereby carrying less pollen between them.
And suddenly it occurred to me that if I keep my gynoecious varieties near to the delicata population, they may get lots of delicata pollen . . .
(Steeples fingers.)
If I save seeds from those, that may get me a zucchini x delicata cross without any real effort! If it’s gynoecious (or mostly gynoecious) and keeps the bush habit, too, that may make for a really interesting cross. Imagine a bush delicata that could be eaten as a highly productive, extra sweet summer squash! Doesn’t that sound yummy?
Last year I had two populations of C. pepo separated by approximately 300 feet. In between them was a mix of C. argyrosperma, C. moschata, and C. ficifolia.
During one phase of my breeding projects, I removed all of the male flowers from one group of C. pepo squash. Those squash seemed to be pollinated at about the usual rate. I have concluded that either 300 feet is not enough even with other cucurbits in between, or the emasculated C. pepos were sometimes getting pollinated from the other squash species.
In my case, I was hoping that the emasculated C. pepo did indeed get pollinated from the group 300 feet away. Maybe these results will be useful to your planning.
It seems logical to me that completely emasculated C. pepo vines could get pollinated with pollen from 300 feet away and also that non-emasculated vines only have a cross pollination rate of 5% when separated by 100 feet, as described by Joseph Lofthouse.
Heh heh! I wasn’t sure if you were quoting me because you didn’t have the quote text. That’s okay, I still agree with the old me!
Quote text is pretty easy to put in – do you see that quotation mark above the box where you type in the text, fifth button from the left? Push it. It’ll stick in the tag to turn something you’ve highlighted into a quote.
Alternately, you can just push enter, type in the closing triangular bracket (it’s the thing you get when you hit shift and press the key for a period), and type in your text, and it’ll do this:
This!
Does that help? It’s always a bit tricky to learn how to play with forum features – we’re all always learning.
After using the ‘bulk emasculation’ for parts of two seasons I can attest to that! In case it’s interesting in the context of this discussion I will try to concisely describe my daily routine of managing several distinct C. pepo populations I wanted to cross in different ways.
One key to this system, possibly the key, is that the two locations I am describing are the most prime locations on opposite sides of my house. Very easy to get to. Also, it may go without my saying here, but this project became a big part of my life for weeks and weeks.
I am going to use approximate numbers but I can refer to my notes and photos if the specifics become important.
In 2024, I had C. pepo planted in two main areas. Approximately 50 of the C. pepo plants produced fruit.
There was a period of about three or four weeks when I was using mass emasculation on 10-12 C. pepo vines in location A so that they could be open pollinated by the rest. At a later point in the season, I was emasculating a different group of maybe 15-18 C. pepo vines in location B for a similar period of time. The remaining number were farther away and used for manual pollination.
There are so many kinds of breeding projects and I’m not experienced enough to generalize, but from my experience I would think that three or four weeks of squash vine emasculation is enough to get enough crosses for many objectives.
There was also some manual pollination.
This was a lot of work, enough that I had to change some other plans I had for the garden due to lack of time.
With regard to the schedule of emasculation work, I felt that I could miss a day without worrying much about a male flower getting through. But missing two days or more of male flower removal was courting danger. I think I did pretty well this year, but it is not the kind of routine that I am generally looking for in my gardening.
Very true! It would probably be easiest for a person who loves the taste of male squash flowers, and is therefore highly motivated to go out and pick them every morning to eat. I personally find the taste of squash flowers fairly meh, so my motivation to go to that level of work would not be high.
I suppose, since you can see whether a flower is male or female while it’s still a small bud, you could probably get away checking a plant and remove all the male flower buds only twice a week or so. But you said you found it needed to be every other day, @markwkidd. Is that right? If so, wow. That’s a lot of work!
Well worth it if that’s a cost you’re willing to pay to reach your desired result. Definitely not a commitment to make casually. Is that something you plan to do again this summer, or do you feel like you’ve done all you want / need to?
Your idea of putting the plants that needed to be emasculated in the most convenient garden locations to reach was smart. I think putting plants that need the most attention in the spaces that are the most convenient to reach is smart.
I found that there were periods where certain groups of the C. pepo plants were producing flowers at a slower place. During those times of slow production I would think in theory it would be OK to visit those plants twice a week. Maybe there were some times when all the pepos were flowering slowly but I’m not sure.
I would personally plant to visit more than twice a week knowing that sometimes weather, health, etc intervene and going out only twice probably turns out fine.
As you pointed out I did get pretty vested in how early I could detect male flowers. Sometimes they have to be left on the vine for a day or two after you can tell they are male just in order to avoid damaging nearby females during the removal. I would often have an idea of which vines I needed to visit first based on seeing bud development on my previous inspection.
At the scale I was working (starting with dozens of plants, winding up with about 50 survivors), I feel there is always a decent chance that I have overlooked a small flower during the previous inspection. It wasn’t common, but certainly there were a couple here and there that I missed the first time.
Sometimes particular vines really go wild with flower production for a week or two, and sometimes a bush form pepo will decide to prolifically sprout flowers at the ends of its vines.
I do intend to take on a similar C. pepo project this coming year. If possible, I would like to grow even more plants with a larger number of segregated populations. My health and practical issues are a limiting factor so I can’t put much more effort into it overall. I may lean more into manual pollination. I’m still thinking about how to set everything up.
In 2024 I bagged female flowers for manual pollination which worked pretty well, but I there is a method involving taping the female flowers closed which I hope might reduce my effort needed for manual pollination. The intense humidity here can be an issue with tape in other outdoor contexts so I’m not sure how excited to be.
Found this pepo, the Orangeti, a spaghetti-type squash but with the carotene. Why start with a Delicata x spaghetti cross when you can skip a couple of generations and start with Delicata x Orangeti crosses?
It’s always a bit tricky to learn how to play with forum features – we’re all always learning. 
