Facing my shelves and before selection I’m wondering what do we want pratically, for what exactly, and after those recent exchanges I feel like that if I just concentrate on taste quality it’s enough for now as this is already super diverse.
“Taste quality” can be seen as pretty subjective though, and can be done in many different ways. But for now I believe it’s good enough : we ensure there is a potential for a great enjoyment of the crop, whatever this “taste quality” is made of.
I would add to that a preliminary criteria the perfect health condition of the fruit (no rottening appearant), at more than 2 months post harvest. So to make sure what’s in our seed lot has a decent storage potential too.
If we agreed on this type of short list (so excluding others to keep it simple: fruit size, yield per plant, particular shape of the fruit…) I would then wonder about quantities and - more to the point - do we want seeds from each fruit separated? I know it’s @WojciechG who is doing that and that enables him to compose packages for everybody with maximum diversity : each seed coming from a different individual fruit. I received that couple years ago, it was amazing .
That too has to be discussed and in particular in regard to practicalities : everything must be kept simple and smooth by now I guess, so maybe best option would be just gathering “some seeds of our BEST squashes for each of us” and that would be perfect. No need to look into complexities like single fruit packaging. Would be my stance for now.
What do you think? We make it that simple : great taste + relatively long storage ?
What are we adding or not adding to these criterias? t
These are the criteria already mentionned in this topic :
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Flesh thickness
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Type of input or no input (manure…)
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Watering (drought resistance)
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Smooth skin and/or edible crust vs thick rind, hard to cut through, not edible
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Rerooting capacities
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Fruit weight: under a certain weight? Above a certain weight? 2 different ranges in Maxima?
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Flesh density
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“Strength” of the flavor
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Bush vs. Vining habits
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Where the seed “hole” is located in the pumpkins : centered? (For evenly cooking purposes)
My take on this is that we could add up to 1 criteria to “great taste” + “long storage”. Something relatively objective and simple like thin skin in Maxima.
And in Moschata I would add nothing.
So keeping it under a certain threshold of complexity but with criteria which speaks to characteristics which are appealing to all of us : not narrowing it down to something too personnal.
What do you think?
The post is there : The limits of undirected selection - #18 by ThomasPicard
So yes to recap that : if we want everything at the same time (=confusion) we are making sure we will achieve nothing. So before getting into more complexities (after / during 2026 growing season?) what’s consistent with that is a short list of criterias consistent with our overall hopes : simple, not nerdy. It’s gonna be the job of each of us to do the actual job of selection anyway : we’re just converging to offer the potential of doing something great, accelerating individual/local adaptation projects in doing so. Or at least it’s my overall take. What’s yours?