You seem to have hung up on that one 
I’ve started to extract seed from my dual purpose summer pepo. The goal there is to develop a population where, while keeping the heavy yield as a summer squash, if you miss the harvest window, the “zucchini” will only get sweeter, more orange, and remain firm (in one word, more pumpkin-like), rather than spongy, unappetizing and tasteless. So I want it to benefit from maturing, instead of becoming compost pile material. I have a thread somewhere in which I started to document it last year.
I have noticed correlation that, in pepo, yellow skin (in my population anyway) more often leads to very deep yellow to deep orange flesh in the mature fruit. Very few green or white/tan ones have orange flesh. Further, last year i only had two fruits that had that pumpkin-like orange flesh. Needless to say, they got overrepresented in this year’s sow. This year 80% of my yellow-skinned pepo has that deep flesh color.
Spot the pepo against the maximas!
Hint, I crossed them out.
MANY of them with orange flesh do taste sweeter, but not always, so I do keep the “offtype” green ones and randomly open some because sometimes you discover a gem that doesn’t have that deep hue and yet it tastes sweet. In my trials, very few deep oranges are tasteless, but it does occur. I weed out those now at the seed collection stage.
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Yep I get your points but this marking is not for me as I would like to propose reassemblings on demand, particularly for market gardeners who (most) will never go into landracing with too much heterogeneity as it’s difficult to sell on the market. That’s the idea of this overall “potentialization” of a squash selection’ thing. In other words: how to go from a few nerds in their places, connecting on the internet from time to time, towards a more living thing, embraced by more people, notably small farmers, and then customers. Saying that because none of my friends -small market gardeners around- will go for landracing unless they can see a quite consistent looking production: they wouldn’t mind if it was a bit heterogenous, but the way my grexes look it’s way to diverse for them to sell on the market. So I try to kind of reverse this “handicap” to create an opportunity. And then yes, as I am only marking mother fruits there will be more heterogeneity than what I mark, so a significant selection work to do on phenotype, but then there will be also more vigor and new qualities - or at least it’s what I am expecting.
Then of course, just for me I would as you not care about many criteria: I would just go with taste and keeping quality… that would be enough! I would mark earliness also and that’s it.
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I wholeheartedly agree that, in order to bring in new people, visual appeal is cardinal. Sorry I missed that crucial point!
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No worry friend 
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I saw a documentary on France 5 about pumpkins a few days back, they had one of 1100 kilo’s. It was shown at the competition in the world’s biggest show that happens every year.
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There’s definitely a gap that you identified here.
Market gardeners and even home gardeners tend to want the same kind of varieties they have now, but improved.
vs.
We in this community tend to mix things up a lot do widely experimental crosses.
I see 3 complementary solutions to this:
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We change the market:
Joseph has done ok educating his customers.
I’m sure some restaurants would be fine with heterogenous Maximas to make soups
Bit hard to do at a wide scale. -
We stabilize less-heterogenous landraces/varieties out of our wide grexes. Seems like what you are doing with your project. Might take a few years!
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We proceed more cautiously at the start of our projects.
E.g. the “modern candy roaster” project.
How would you proceed if someone told you they really like Red Kuri squash, but that it needs improvement?
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It’s not that divided in my opinion, even if I understand all your points, for example Joseph favouring long neck moschatas in selection for his chefs, or keeping a fixed phenotype for the Yellow Crookneck, i.e. Just bringing in a few different strains of the same variety and letting diversity in leaves appearances, growth habits, but being strict on phenotype.
I see some in here doing things in between : like the MSPM community seed house being strict on black clubed shaped eggplants and crossing of different varieties altogether.
First move would be saying : I would not be doing anything about his request… Then I think why not crossing different strains of Red Kuri… And eventually go to a grex with nearby phenotypes.
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Just received it! Yolke Colour Fan
I like this tool, I find it nice
Used for eggs usually.
But beware of prices: don’t buy it new. I have been veeeeery lucky finding it at 10€ (more or less 10$). New it costs over 250€!!! Crazy.
I have seen @Joseph_Lofthouse you sometimes use some kind of colorimetric thing, am I right? How do you call that? I haven’t find anything like that yet but I like the idea of havind one stanrdise thing to compare and because our memories are what they are! 
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To my knowledge there was nothing recorded live with the late Brent Loy… But here it is: the ultimate cucurbita genus conference! Great summary of his work - 1 hour :
See the links in the first post to upload his publications
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In this post I have just summarized my year’s selection, following exchanges in this topic which helped me a lot building its design : Direct seed exchange among EU members 2024-2025 - #21 by ThomasPicard
It took me about 4 days running the maxima and moschata selection. Was really enjoyable actually, even if hard work with a deadline which stressed me a bit.
At the end of the day, criteria changed a bit, method also as I’ve needed to simplify some things, but I feel more experienced and that is really great! Now I got a consistent method, to embrace different kinds of projects, from these - let’s say - “meta-populations” assembled for and shown in the International Farmers Seeds Gathering to show diversity first thing.
Now that I am confident in my method, I could handle some crowd tastings.
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Update: one out of sixteen fruits of the Baker Creek Ayote has green flesh. All others, a dark vibrant orange.
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Wow. This is just what I’ve been looking for. Did I miss out on these seeds? Happy to pay postage and handling! By “randomly” do you mean that both moschatas and maximas were growing together with the tetsukabuto?
I meant some plants were in my maxima patch (so 3/4 maxima as far as DNA is concerned) and others in my moschata patch…
I cannot send in the US, sorry, and I have stopped shipping seedsfor this season.
More specifically on that in here: EU: Commercial interspecific hybrids to share (maxima x moschata)
As those stored so well this year they will remain as a separate project aiming at ultra long storage. I mean separate from my moschata and maxima selections: I will plant them separate from those, but interplanted with my very best maximas and moschatas, aiming at restoring fertility either on the maxima or on the moschata side (or in between!?!).
As you can see in pictures, the different f1s look the same, so I would bet there is are very very slight to no differences between mother plants in the prior generation.
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Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I didn’t realize you were outside the US. Do you know of any US breeders on trying the same thing? i.e. trying to back-cross tetsukabuto hybrids to remove male sterility? I would love to try that, but if someone is already a few years into a project, I’d hate to start from scratch.
I kind of care a little bit about squash shape, but only for one purpose: being able to store as many as possible in as small a space as possible. 
Cylinder-shapes (like zucchini) are quite nice for that purpose. Irregular lumpy shapes are annoying.
But ultimately, I care a lot more about flavor of the fruit (most important factor!), drought tolerance of the plants, productivity of the plants, storage life of the fruit, and how thick the rind is (if it’s hard to cut, I don’t want it!).
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Hi @ThomasPicard, thank you very much for sharing about your cucurbits experiments, I am learning a lot!
Unfortunately, I started a maxima landrace this year without realizing all the work that you had already started to do. But at the same time, it still feels like a good choice to start with a cucurbit as a beginner, I can do live improvements on my own experiment in the light of your work, and, if I understood well, I may even be able to enjoy the seeds of your work next year in case I don’t succeed on my side (I have a huge slug pressure here, and they have already eaten very fast some of my maximas’ seedlings as soon as transplanted…!).
I have a few questions regarding your setting (my apologizes if the answers are already written somewhere, I tried to read as much as I could, but I may have unseen some information!):
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In your sketch, at the ‘selection’ step, you show that the “medium” and “good” tasting are planted around the plot. Is there a reason why they would not be planted, for instance, as inter-rows, or even scattered everywhere to maximize cross-pollination?
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In the same sketch, at the ‘maintenance’ step, no new genetics is added year after year. Don’t you think that it might lead to genetic erosion? Or, is it that you consider your diversity at the beginning is so huge, that you just need to plant enough plants every year to make sure you don’t lose genes? I am thinking about Joseph’s practice of adding every year 10% new genetics and 10% genetics from the previous years to buffer climate variability. Would it make sense, then, that these 10%+10% be planted around the plot every year, even in the maintenance step, to keep the population very rich and dynamic?
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For tetsukabuto, what are you exactly expecting from pollinations with maximas or moschatas? I would imagine that their excellent features (I watched the presentation
) come from the fact that they are hybrids, but that these features may disappear once the genes come back on either the moschata or the maxima’s side. Do you have a different understanding, or is it just that you’d like to try anyway to see if something interesting happens? -
I understood that your goal is to maintain dynamic populations so that you always have a pool in which you can start a selection process towards a more specific landrace, without the need to start again from scratch with the grex ; and that you can also share this population to other people who will save time creating their own landrace? I really like this idea. I hope I can also do it one day with one or a few species, to be able to share them around. But I also wonder what it implies for you and your work organization: are you happy with keeping a wide and unselected population? Or are you going to, each year, grow in another plot a more selected population (like, say: you keep big and small maxima’s fruits in the dynamic population so it can potentially fit everyone’s need and taste, but what about if you personally prefer big maximas?)
I hope this makes sense
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Hi @lenaic, you are there asking some serious and precise questions, thank you! I’ll try to reply within days! Thanks again. That’s the type of question which help meto progress, thanks again!
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Hi Lénaïc!
There I simply figured out a way to visualize how I would spread my different “qualities” from last year selection. The interannual ratios are -in my mind- more important than the positionning of these sub-lots.
I’m just reuploading this for everybody to see what we’re talking about: this reallocation of “qualities”:
That was quite theoretical and eventually I allocated each row to a quality, and yes with the best in the central rows and the worse on the sides.
As I’ve given many seeds of my “best selection only” (“excellent” on graph), for example: watermelons to about ten market gardeners for them to familiarise with our approach and see by their own eyes -but with an immediate reward!- the overall intention was to find a framework to progress consistently towards excellence WITHOUT getting rid of the “good” (bon) or “average” (moyen), in other words: WHILE maintaining a maximum diversity. What I mean by that is that if I was to make a living of selling fruits -which at some point I am sure will be the case- I would not risk selling super diverse stuff, which is something the customers need to get accustomed to, without being sure my products are excellent tasting only.
It’s why I gave seeds of those to market gardeners: I want thel to have direct return on investment let’s say for them to join the movement.
So it’s all about maximizing diversity while making giant progresses.
What I didn’t expect is that in practice this year, as I had a crazy amount of “average tasting” seeds this allowed me to do crazy over-sowings: like up to 30 seeds per final plant, to do a super strong survival of the fittest selection for those supposedly less tasty, so eventually those that will contribute their genetics via pollen will add their crazy vigor.
And then in central rows, of the “excellent tasting” I had sometimes just 5 seeds per final plant for early growth post-selection, as I had less fruits from these last year, so the “survival of the fastest”(!) factor is less important for these.
Then : eventually straight to your question(!): I could have scattered them around yes, but it was and it is an easier way to organise my fields, and as this organisation was somekind of a headache I would stand by that later I think. But I’m still open to discussing advantages and drawbacks of that kind of system.