Pumpkin Landrace

Adaptation Projects Cucurbits
1

2022-10-13T07:00:00Z
I am considering doing a pumpkin (pepo varieties) landrace next year and was wondering if anyone had any input on if this is a viable thing to do or how I should go about it. Typically I never grow pepos because of pest pressure.

Some of the goals I am looking to achieve are:
-Earliness - to avoid high pest pressure that comes on later in the season. The earliest varieties I’ve seen are around 80 days.
-Pest tolerance - however much is possible for pepos to withstand the initial onset of squash bugs and squash vine borers. Vigor will likely play into this, as well as the ability to set roots at leaf nodules.
-Flavor - the biggest reason I want to do this is because I have nostalgia for the sugar pie pumpkins my mother grew when I was a child. To me there is something in the flavor and smell of pumpkins that maximas and moschatas lack, especially when making pumpkin pie.

Varieties I am considering using:
Sugar Baby
Winter Luxury
Ohama
Idaho Gem - which is supposedly mature at 70 days - very early
Big Red California Sugar

I see that Adaptive Seeds has a Pumpkin Pie Party which is a mix of 11 varieties they let cross. They’ve basically done the first step for me but their conditions are very different than mine and they do not say what they’ve been selecting for besides taste.

Any thoughts or suggestions on this?

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Julia D
Are you considering adding acorn or delicata into the mix? I’m not into pumpkins at this point, grew sugar baby last year, tasted blah, bought a pie pumpkin at the store and it tasted bitter. So I think that a tasty early pumpkin landrace will be popular because people love pumpkins and maybe commercial breeders have ruined the flavor by selecting for looks/size/halloween. Or maybe that’s just in my climate.

Lowell M
I do not think so. I have only grown acorn once. It was thelma sanders and I remembering it having light yellow flesh and being mildly sweet. I really like the dark orange colored pumpkins and the netted ones appeal to me as well so those will probably end up being my goal on appearance. That’s interesting about your sugar baby experience. It has been a long time since I’ve had one so I can’t really compare. I hope they still taste as I remember here.

Ryder Tstrong text
I think it’s a great idea too! No suggestions though, we only had decent results growing pepos for the first time this year and the only pumpkin was decorative.

Jesse I
Retzer gold has been really good for me in very short season in southern Finland. Dont have much to compare for how good it’s compared to others, but I prefere maxima/moschata myself. It atleast has hulles seeds as a extra feature that might good compination. It’s quite fast for it’s size (6-10kg). For me it’s been about 90 days from seed to colour change and that’s with week lost due to slow growth after sowing because of very cool period so hotter climate might be closer to 80 days. We dont have any of those pests so cant say anything about that.

Lowell M
Thank you for the suggestion! I’ve never seen it in a catalog in the states but I’ll have a look around. I was also thinking it would be cool to have a good pumpkin that also has hullless seeds but that might be ambitious for the first few years while I’m just trying to get something that thrives and survives the insect pressure.

3

I’m going to try this from the Experimental Farm Network this year:

https://store.experimentalfarmnetwork.org/products/maxidiwiac-buffalo-bird-woman-summer-squash

I’m also going to try Ronde de Nice, because even though it’s included in that landrace, it looks awesome all on its own:

This is one of the reviews of it: “I am super excited to find this variety. I’ve grown different varieties of zucchini over the years and by far this is the best ever. Here in Hawaii we have fruit flies, cut worms and every other evil creature out there that destroys Squash. For some reason this variety is bug resistant. The flavor is amazing. Super high-yield. So easy to grow. I will definitely be buying more seeds.”

So maybe it’ll be resistant to your insects, too? Unless of course your pests are hungry chipmunks, in which case, I have no idea what to do. :wink:

Round summer squashes seem to mature into pumpkin-shaped winter squashes. And tasty summer squashes seem to mature into even tastier winter squashes. So if you want earliness and great flavor in your pepo pumpkins, adding round summer squashes to your landrace is likely to give you both.

4

I don’t think summer squash flavour is related to how they taste as winter squash. Those that I have let mature have been mediocre at most. Haven’t tried ronde de nice as mature fruit, but I have one round variety that tastes arleast as good if not better as summer squash and that doesn’t have anything to eat as mature fruit. It’s just hard shell that needs saw to cut open and flesh is so thin that there is nothing to eat even it’s edible. It’s quite white flesh that usually means it’s not very flavourful.

5

OH EFN had some tantalizing squash this year. I ended up getting the long Maycock selection. Please let me know how the maxidiwaic selection goes. I didn’t get it because I want really orange pumpkins on the inside and out, and thought this was more like marrows. I have 3 pepo projects going next year so I couldn’t take on another one due to lack of isolation spaces.

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This has been my experience as well. Summer squash as winter squash were not deep orange inside and had a different flavor.

7

If you want tasty orange pumpkins, Tatume tastes delicious as summer squash, and even better when it’s more mature. Yummmm.

8

Huh! My experience so far has been that the summer squash I find tastiest and most flavorful are the tastiest and most flavorful as winter squash. I find they have the same flavor to me, it’s just that it’s mild when unripe and strong when ripe.

That said, I have found tasty winter squash that are thoroughly meh as summer squash. My plan is to taste every plant as both and save seeds from everything that tastes good both ways.

Last year, I had one plant with an interesting phenotype that was not very tasty as summer squash, and I let the fruits grow to maturity because I was assuming they would taste better as winter squash. Nah. They were edible, but the least tasty winter squash fruits I got from my garden. If I’d known, I could have ripped it out and replanted something else in its space!

So my plan from now on is to leave the first (and maybe second) fruit from every plant to grow into a winter squash, taste the second or third fruit from every plant as a summer squash, and if it’s not good as summer squash, harvest the other fruits and pull out the plant and put a new seed in its place.

I’m also thinking I’ll pull out the plants that take the longest to produce their first female flower. I’ll probably have some arbitrary standard like “I’ll pull out anything that doesn’t have a female flower by the time the first plant to grow a female flower has three fruits on it,” or something.

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9

I’m looking at a photo of the mature squash on Victory Seeds and it is a pale yellow inside. That’s a no for me :slight_smile: I desire that deeep orange.

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10

My experience with pepo summer squash is that they typically are only good as summer squash or stuffed as marrows. But I want pie pumpkins that are deep orange and aromatic, like I remember them when I was a kid. These were also pepo varieties and we never ate them as summer squash, only as pumpkins. I’ve never used maxima as summer squash but have eaten some tromboncino as summer squash and it is good.

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11

Deeeeeep orange sounds delicious! Lots of great carotene, as Joseph Lofthouse keeps saying. :smiley:

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12

I was wondering how did the Pepo Pumpkin Landrace going? As I am a sucker for anything pumpkin related.

We located in Homestead, FL, and are currently working on landracing Maximas and Moschatas. Currently, we are crossing 11 Blue Maxima Pumpkin varieties. And for the Moschatas we crossed 14 strains of Seminole Pumpkins that we found on Etsy and eBay. In the future we will add more to our Moschata mix from our collection.

Someday, we would like to work with Pepos.

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It failed completely that year. This year, things have been much better. I have to coddle pepos to grow them. There is no sign of squash vine borers, yet, but I am sure they will be around soon. It is no longer pumpkin-focused and instead is whatever-will-grow-focused.

Acquiring some wild pepo genetics to trail against squash vine borer and breed into pepos for resistance, if it exists.

Typically I have the same issues with maxima. Moschata grow great here.

Do you have issues with squash vine borers on your maxima?

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I’m sorry, that sucks! I was hopeful for the Pepos!

Do you guys have Squash Vine Borers up there? I’ve never seen them before. Only seen the Melon Worm Moth caterpillars on our pumpkins. There were hundreds of them, and they were on every leaf.

I thought that we would have all of the pests down here because we are surrounded by lots of veggie fields. The Redlands is the Historic Agricultural district in Homestead. And plus, it wasn’t a good year for the yellow crookneck squash that was growing both of the gigantic fields surrounding our neighborhood.

I’ve only have experience growing Moschatas, with good success. We have about 30 pounds of Seminole Pumpkins that we harvested this Feburary. We got lucky and produced 6 medium sized ones.

We don’t have any experience with Maximas yet. We’ve just planted our first ever Maximas this week.

(Blue Bayou, Blue Delight F1, Blue Doll F1, Blue Eyes F1, Blue Hubbard, Green Jarradale, Hopi Grey, lots of Jarrahdale strains, New Zealand Blue, Queensland Blue, Sibley, Silver Moon F1, Strawberry Crown.)

I got to start posting our landracing updates and results onto here. I usually post on our Facebook page.

Someday, I want to plant out our collection of Pepo Pumpkins. I don’t think that they can handle being planted in the Spring, the temps, humidity and pest pressure is too great. Maybe in the Fall sometime. We planted the Seminoles last Fall and the only pest that bothered them were the Melon Worm Moth. They completely decimated the plants, and partially ate one pumpkin at the end.

You should try growing the Seminole Pumpkin. They did very well for us. We only watered them a lot at the beginning to get them established. Then throughout the growing season we watered them once a week. Didn’t weed them, or used chemicals on them. I had to fight myself to not give them fertilizer. Also, didn’t kill any of the Melon Worm Moth caterpillars that were on them. We also have ducks that eventually ate them all after most of the plants were skeletonized.

Our best medium sized Seminole Pumpkin strains were from St Augustine, FL, and our second best was from Elkins Park, PA.

We want to cross our Seminole Pumpkins with all of the Moschata winter Squash seeds that we have to create the best pumpkin for us.

(There’s still Autumn Frost F1, Butter Nut Dumpling, lots of Calabaza, 2 Cherokee Tans, Dickinson, Fairytale, Gouda, Long Island Cheese, Magic Cushaw (Moschata), GTS Moschata mix, Mrs Amerson, Musquee de Provence, more Seminole Pumpkins, and Upper Ground Sweet Potato that need to be added to the mix. We want to keep the butternuts separated at different times of the year.)

We haven’t processed them yet. We want to see how long they will store on the counter, and use them for baby food once our 4 month old baby is 6 months old.

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I am doing a seed expansion of Cushaw this season. And all my Moschatas are planted out. That’s it for my area with SVB and squash bugs in heavy numbers. Pepo and Maxima are no go here. Use the luffa gourds young for a summer squash alternative. I’ve yet to start working with fig leaf gourds here.

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I was wanting to get a packet of those as well! It’ll help keep costs low for the Pepo parent seed stock.

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I have been disappointed in Pepos here too.

This year I decided to try to cross Tatume squash with tall white maycock and bird woman squash. The tatume is supposed vine out to 10 or 20 feet or something and be resistant to borers, although I haven’t witnessed it yet so I can’t say firsthand. We’ll see if I can succeed. If so I’ll be selecting for that long vine trait. Maybe you can attempt to cross the tatume, if it works against borers, into some pumpkins.

My intuition tells me that because I have sandy ish soil and get 60 inches of rainfall causing it to be poor that I need plants that grow continuously all season. Plants should make massive vines to outcompete poor soil, disease, pests, and weeds. Bush type plants I think would do fine for people who buy compost and grow in a controlled environment but I don’t want to do that. So that is my goal, pepo squash that grows uncontrollably. If that doesn’t work, I’ll abandon pepo.

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My Tatume crosses last year were putting down roots at nodes, and they also had active vines.

The squash bugs were present but the Tatume just sneered at them. They were decimated by SVB, but continued to grow and fruit when everything else was dead. When I killed the larvae the plants scabbed over and continued to grow.

I finally pulled them in mid September, if I remember correctly, not because they were dead but because the larvae in them needed to be destroyed.

I didn’t bother to mess with the squash bugs, since my plants are used to them. I have some ideas on how to mitigate SVB until the plants can adapt.