Network and potentialization of a squash selection (+Loy's studies)

You seem to have hung up on that one :rofl:

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.

1 Like

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.

1 Like

I wholeheartedly agree that, in order to bring in new people, visual appeal is cardinal. Sorry I missed that crucial point!

1 Like

No worry friend :joy:

1 Like

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.

Kürbisausstellung Ludwigsburg im Blüba - Jucker Farm

1 Like

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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!

  3. 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?

1 Like

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.

1 Like

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! :slight_smile:

2 Likes