I agree with you that great taste and long storage should be our main focus.
Regarding all my vegetables they self select for slug and snail resistance. And they must survive the very wet and rainy spring, the very dry June, July and August and the rainy and wet September.
The other requisite can be selected from everybody that will receive the seeds, I think.
As a guide, I suggest looking at the goals we have when we get confused. The goals of doing this project is:
Seed increase for the community. Squash are prolific seeders so this will happen with little effort if we focus on this crop.
Increase diversity and quality of the squash seed in our community. This is where the discussion in the thread has gone mostly and perhaps it shows where our energy is.
Create a focus and resource for new members. For me this effect comes naturally if we put focus on the crops. It mean we will create some natural points of becoming part of the community too and easy point of entry to become part of something. So keep that in mind the coming months as we get new members - this would be a good place to get involved (and get seed). And it will be the seed we will share first with people interested in our way of growing.
Create adapation gardening success stories (pictures!) that are closer to our region and generate data that can be used as proof of concept for adapation gardening. My add is that we also want the stories of failure (and sometimes those stories have a triumph in the end - as anyone knows that have grown a diverse population one year where all but 1% survived, which then provided beautifully adapted seed the coming generations). The point here is set ourselves up for powerful narratives and then try to see where it goes without cheating, so the stories are also true and can be reproduced. A simple project for someone who struggles with squash for some reason would be to grow one row of named commercial cultivars next to one row of our most diverse squash seed, then take pictures over the season and evaluate the results. Save seed, then continue to do the same documentation one or two years more.
As for increased quality, I would join @ThomasPicard in singling out taste as a main focus.
Stephane is right that taste is subjective. That doesnât mean our subjective taste is random or radically different. For example, we know that most people like a relatively high sugar content in many vegetables - and this goes for squash too. By the way, high sugar (dry matter) content usually corresponds to creamy, smooth texture. So these are not so different criteria to select for.
Secondly, subjectivity can be worked with through engaging lots of other people in tastings. Itâs also much more fun than wading through endless amounts of squash on your own, where it is highly likely that you lose your sense of judgment - a well-known phenomenon at my school where colleagues taste studentsâ dishes for hours on end every day. So the solution would be to get other tongues in on the judging.
The theory on what a good tasting squash is or isnât doesnât matter so much in the end if you just get people to taste the squash, rate them (on a hedonic scale), talk a lot about what youâre tasting (and what you like) and then find the winners.
My proposal is that as part of our squash focus, we commit to organizing more tastings than we normally do. We can share tips and experiences so we make sure they become both enjoyable experiences and also raise the precision in our taste selection.
I agree, those are two different goals. In a way, we try to work on creating a very diverse population that has been selected on a few criteria. So not maximum diversity, but as diverse as can be while selecting for a few traits (like taste). The promise for me is that we might be able to create an evolutionary population that is highly likely to adapt to different places and that is also more likely to have better-than-average tasting squash in it.
2025 has been my first year of landrace gardening, and Maxima was my focus crop to get into it 
For 2026, I was planning to keep going with Maxima, and to add Moschata as my second focus crop.
So, I am naturally motivated to contribute to this collective focus crop effort! Especially if we donât need to participate to 3 groups (not sure yet if I can have enough time in 2026), and especially if the goal is toward creating and maintaining a diverse evolutive population to help others kickstart their adaptative projects more easily (rather than creating a collective landrace).
For Maximas, if it is useful, I can probably supply some store-bought seeds from about 20 varieties (leftovers from last year), and probably seeds from my own 2025 harvest (but I havenât extracted the seeds yet). I am also happy to receive some seeds to try multiplying them.
For Moschata, I have very little diversity, so I will happily receive seeds from this group if possible. And I can also consider buying some store-bought seeds, keeping some for me, and sharing some with the group to increase chances of success (I had a huge slug pressure here in 2025).
Following the common practice on GTS forum, I was about to centralize on one topic âLĂ©naĂŻcâs landrace gardening experiments in 2025â, including some details about Maximas. But, for the good functioning of this group, and for avoiding redundancy, it feels more appropriate to share my 2025 Maximasâ experiments here in this topic, right?
As an appetizer, here is the result of my 2025 Maximasâ first year seeds increase! I planted about 150 plants, and those fruits are the few survivors to the huge slug pressure I had in spring, plus two droughts and one tornado during summer. 
Welcome aboard @lenaic and thanks for the beautiful picture 
i will add you to the list of participants.
We are still discussing on the exact goals of our focus crops and all the surrounding logistics, but we have decided that 1 crop per participant is enough, meaning people can participate with as many or few crops as they like, as long as they choose at least one of the six.
Concerning the sharing of seeds: We are still discussing the logistics in the main thread. But thank you for offering to share. I hope we as a group can finalize some sort of plan in the following weeks how exactly we want to proceed.
And concerning your questions about where to post: I would indeed avoiding posting many photos in your personal thread and posting them again here. But for example I think there is nothing bad about still posting some photos to your personal documentation thread. After all, people that are interested in your personal journey can follow it much better if it is not intermingled with other peoples posts. And it may also be valuable for you to have a kind of gardening journal that mainly belongs to you.
I - for example- have also my personal squash thread and I plan to still post there. I may post to my personal thread stuff like sowing dates, picking dates etc, so I have them all in one place. But discussions, pictures etc will propably be in here. And maybe I will post a link, so interested people know where i keep my more in depth information.
My personal guidline is: I donât post exactly the same stuff in 2 threads. If I have nothing new to add, I just link my post in the other threads. (but I am not a mod!)
I would love to participate with my ever-developing moschata landrace. It started with seeds sent to me by Joseph Lofthouse, many years ago. Every year Iâve added one or more new commercial varieties. I would love to add landrace seeds, instead of commercial cultivars. Thatâs how I dream to live with the landrace. I prefer the size as big as the plant can sustain, and a long massive neck. For a two-person household, we find long-neck moschata perfect. We can cut small slices from the massive neck, and sap starts oozing out. After 5 minutes, the sap can be smeared even over the surface, and it will protect the squash from drying out.
The seeds I add to my landrace, I hope the grower selects for taste and storability. Other traits I can manage.
And Iâll only be happy to share seeds.
Hi Soeren,
I am glad that you are participating. Your moschata sounds interesting indeed I was wondering if the sap is useful for something, thank you for clearing that up for me!
Great, I like this logic, Iâll do like this too, thank you 
Hi. Looking at your photo Iâd say the brownish in the middle (is it 1885?) looks like maxima x pepo cross. The stem isnât round and heavily scarred like maximas and shape is more like pepo as well, but colour doesnât look like it would be pure pepo as well. Maximas also more commonly have a ânoseâ on the other side, but that ofcourse doesnât show in the picture and Iâm sure itâs not as sure sign in crosses. Quite sure itâs not pure maxima. Just a heads up if you want to save seeds separately and check how it turns out. Where you interested in maxima x pepo crosses @ThomasPicard ? What do reckon of that fruit?
I think rerooting is sort of priority thatâs not priority, if it makes sense. Or it can be selected by water scarcity and selecting the best performers. At the same time people can look for the needle in the haystack by observing plants, but it might not be necessary if conditions are rough enough for special traits to have advantage. Still itâs interesting to observe plants and if there is something that looks like it has potential, separate it for future seed increase. But yes, it shouldnât be too complex. Overall better if contitions are on the rougher side, but that might not be always possible. At least I noticed that addidng too many challenges here will postpone the harvest too much, if there is a harvest. Where itâs possible itâs always good to try the limits. Otherwise you donât know what the limits are.
Another trait is size of the seeds. Generally I would think bigger seeds are better. Seedlings start bigger and so they should be better adapted to survive bugs and to emerge harder soil surfaces. Small seed cavity/thick flesh was already mentioned, but that would also limit the amounts of seeds to more reasonable. At least I donât see squash a crop where lack of seeds is ever going to be problem. Rather put the energy to grow flesh and bigger seeds.
