Flesh looks great! I remember you had a brix meter now as well?
I have it 
The thing is that in order to extract liquid from squash to measure brix/sugar levels with a refractometer, you need to freeze the pulp before and then squeeze it. So it’s not direct measurement and not that convenient.
Nonetheless pieces of my “very best” of last year were frozen until a couple weeks ago and they were much hugher brix than random squashes of the year, up to 14,5, which equals my sweetest watermelon if the year! Crazy… but overall those “very best” were around 9-11, contrastint with random squash averaging 6-7.
1 Like
14.5 sounds high! There are a lot of references online in terms of typical brix values also. I guess it might be only worth it to keep track of your best specimens over the years and not your entire crop.
1 Like
I personnally don’t use the dark orange colour as a proxy to great taste because my taste buds doesn’t seem to correlate with that “dark orange = great taste” formula.
Nonetheless I find that colour pretty appealing, and it’s always good to remember that, as Joseph mentionned couple times, that dark colour is the consequence of the presence of antioxydants named carotenoids. So it’s both good for us and a first sign of a relatively healthy plant - as you need good health to synthetize those secundary metabolites in good amounts : it’s very energy demanding (see Plant Health Pyramid - Kempf).
Of course we should never decorrelate that from the overall taste assesment. Because :
- if you don’t have also enough sugars it’s not that appealing,
- if you don’t have high starch at harvest it just won’t last in storage and also won’t have a decent texture,
- If you don’t have that little “something more” in terms of flavors - like those buttery aromas - it’s good but not great.
Sufficient sugar levels, high starch level at harvest (converted in sugar later in storage), and more complex aromas are also high energy demanding.
If all are combined together, with high fruit yields on top : they speaks to the superior health and so “potential” of a plant. Carotenoids is just adding a layer to it: another line to that “plant health matrix”.
That’s where I say that breeding for taste is breeding for plant health, which is the very sign of “adaptation”. And it’s essentially what we humans have been doing forever… so there’s nothing new in that essentially.
Also, just to put those proxies/factors in perspective : many moschatas bred in the last century for canning (like Dickinson Field Type) were bred for three things : high yields, dark orange and sugar levels just sufficient to be acceptable. And so, as Brent Loy explained very clearly, that meant breeding for high water content, went also to the detriment of starch level, and so to storage capacities and overall texture… That just to say that if isolated, the simple “dark orange” factor won’t speak to other things we’re looking for, for example overall plant health…
Also still good to know : Brent Loy outlined clearly that the Yolk Colour Fan did correlate perfectly with the carotenoid contents in the fruit in its higher range (7-8 to 15).
1 Like
I did upload best Brent Loy’s contents at the end of this post :
Incredible documents! Main one for what’s outlined above being this short one :
Maximizing Yield and Eating Quality in Winter Squash 11 (1) (1).pdf (20.7 KB)
Sugar, starch, yield, texture, water content, storage capacity… all explained in relation to each other and to breeding
Have you considered using a garlic press? I have done with other vegetables. You just need a few drops.
2 Likes
Thank you Malte! No I did not, sounds good
2 Likes
I’ve ended this taste selection, first tasted raw for convenience, with a secundary cooked selection on top, using a pan with thin pieces of 5 squashes in each. Took me 2 hours for what I consider my “elite selection” of the year.
I’ve tasted only squashes from plants which were high yielding
This secundary cooked selection more or less confirmed the raw selection, adding some nuances and eliminating some which were actually not that good. Which is cool.
Next year I could do a participatory selection.
A couple pics :
6 Likes
This could the soundtrack of those 2025 experiments, for anybody going through it : Spotify
Key findings of my taste selection confronted with my growth/plant health assessment of individual plants, as done at harvest, with indicators gathered in a spreadsheet including pictures, keynotes (using Kobotoolbox on a tablet) :
Taste selection was undertaken on an original 500kg pile of moschatas, stored on shelves in an open barn bay, in really suboptimal storage conditions, slightly above freezing but still exposed to atmospheric humidity. Selection done at 3 months post harvest.
First step was to discard every fruits having the single light storage problem, which would have made the fruit collapse around January/February. So that’s a selection consistant with a long-term storage and use objective. So 35-40% of the fruits were gone by then.
Then taste selection was conducted in two steps:
- First : raw step, using a spoon, to pre-select the best, looking for sweetness AND aromas (things like a pronounced buttery flavor)
- Second : baking step, in thin layers in a pan (see above post), to confirm that first step, precise it. Helped also to discard about 10% of “false positives” (= falsely “great tasting”, as tasted raw)
The really really really interesting thing was to confront that sensory evaluation at 3 month post harvest of squash stored in suboptimal conditions WITH GROWTH INDICATORS I had gathered :
Here are the key take aways :
- Zero plant with bad to average growth indicators did produce a single remarkably tasting fruit. So from those struggling plants, which accounted for 40 to 50% of the remaining squashes, absolutely none made a remarkable fruit.
- All selected for very good taste had great to exceptional growth indicators, in particular the “over the top” taste selected : all high to super high yielding, all having long vines, most showing exceptional rooting and rerooting capacities, most still growing at harvest, some even flowering again! Other way to say it : none of those fruits were picked up on collapsing plants at harvest.
Meaning to me and for practical purposes : growth indicators, plant health indicators, can be consistantly used as the minimum threshold for selection not only on “adaptation” but ALSO on great taste, which is a fantastic take away! 
Those - or at least in my place and in moschatas - seem to be formidable proxies :
Consequentially :
-
At harvest, that means that I could focus on storing properly the fruits from the 10-25% most exceptional plants, and so sell, give, or eat the others, without the burden of looking after them, storing them in a proper manner. All my taste selection would be focused on those great individuals, so dimishing a lot the taste selection work.
-
More than ever I’ll maintain my early vigor selection, but as much as possible late in season, so with bigger spacings : to see more accurately plant development before culling the slow growing, those less “adapted”. I would love to go as far as 45 days post sowing to do the culling, and maybe in 2 culling steps.
I’ll just add up to that that “high yield” apart hasn’t been a great proxy for great taste, and nor for long storage. That is consistant with what Brent Loy already outlined in his “Grower’s Paradox” document : breeding for yield only is kind of easy… but it doesn’t tell you anything about…quality! As in squash, long storage necessitates high levels of starch at harvest, so to say superior photosynthetic and metabolism capacities, as starch is a complex molecule, much much more complex than the simple sugars. which still can make a decent squash at harvest but if not balanced with high starch level, will make fruits collapse early… And as some say "winter has been bread out of winter squash”, we can guess how…
Also, and as outlined by the Kempf-White-Mella trio, plants with superior health, superior soil-plant interactions (like in my squash case : vine long length, rerooting capacities, leathery texture of leaves, intense greens, continuous growth super late in season, and new flowers, and giant tendrils…) are more inclined to create aromatic compounds, a.k.a. secondary metabolites. This also has been relatively consistant with my taste selection.
That’s why I say that plant health is a really good minimum threshold for selection. And actually it’s what farmers, humans have been doing forever… 
To be continued…
9 Likes
Very insightful! Is there a correlation between yield and health indicators?
1 Like
I can’t easily access my database now that I’m traveling until April, so I can’t do precise correlations, but to summarize it : yes, there is a strong correlation between high yields and good plant health indicators at harvest.
By plant health indicators again I mean
- a matrix of different lines of data separated: vine length, leaf indicators (dry to leathery), root indicators (main root, secondaries, rhizosheath assessment…), vine tip growth indicators… on 130 plants.
- a synthetic figure of 1 to 5, categorizing briefly my take in situ on the vitality of the plants, after that first analyses of specifics.
Then I think it’s very easy to apprehend the why yields correlate strongly with plant health indicators : like a giant lush tree has more capacities to produce a big harvest than a small decaying one of same age, or a big surface of solar pannels (leaves) has more capacities to photosynthetize complex substances - like those in fruits notably-, but also root exsudates, which trigger more rhizophagy, which in return “give back” more nutrient, more drought resistance, then comparatively that triggers more leaf growth, and more photosynthesis… it’s all coherent, it’s all feedback loops. We’re selecting “holobionts”…but that is just a reinvention in the crazy modern westerners vocabulary of what the farmers have always been doing through the ages… before the industry took other.
But to precise that correlation, you would want to discard those rare plants (2%?) which didn’t produce a single fruit in time, and which are all really healthy at harvest, and then the plant health - yield signal goes VERY STRONG. That showed me how energy demanding the fruiting itself is for cucurbits : growing healthy seems easy UNTIL fruiting starts… Then I saw a high number of plants decaying after the start of the fruiting stage, something well known in plant physiology (“vegetative” and then “reproductive” stage, when most illnesses show up - for fruiting plants).
Then, if my taste assessment showed that there was very few excellent fruits in the low yielding plants, the yield criteria taken apart isn’t consistant with QUALITY (great and storage capacity essentially), and the best correlation with quality will be found in the plants which are relatively early fruiting AND still have good growth/health indicators at harvest : that’s the holly grail!
So all my best squashes of the year came from those plants : high yielding, with fruiting starting relatively early, and with excellent health indicators at harvest. That combined. About 10 plants in 130.
The ultra-early fruiting plants (less than 5%) did collapse rapidly, making a poor yield, and low quality fruits. Again it is “as if” the plants needed to have a strong “engine” (vines, leaves, roots…) before fruiting to bring in quality… not even to talk about yield.
Most of the high yielding plants but later fruiting had to be discarded, not because they were showing no potential, but because they were harvested too immature, and in that particular case taste doesn’t improve in storage : the flesh gets deprived from its best component to fill in the seeds.
I will use some of those with high yield potential on the sides of my plots next year, to keep diversity, but most of those seeds will go to a pig farmer, growing squashes with corn in milpa style : him wants yield and storage potential overall to feed his animals until February-March… to examplify that, here is one of 6 trailers of maximas which were high yielding and in perfect storage condition at taste selection in 2024, but were disappointing tastewise : he sow their seeds in May 2025 and made a huge harvest in the shades of corn in Haute-Saône, without compromising his corn yields :
This is the trailer from which seeds were taken out to dry, so he’ll have some moschatas to add up to his mix next year!
1 Like
These were the fruits grouped by plant yield before taste selection. Those had already undergo a storage selection in suboptimal conditions.
Yields are relative to a sxxxxy sandy soil with no inputs and little irrigation with a huge drought showing up early in season :
Under 1,5kg / plant
1-5-3kg :
3-6kg :
6+kg :
Couple pics of some of those very best tasting, also high yielding, all showing good to excellent health indicators :
A picture of the under 3kg regrouped category : all who “qualified” after taste selection :
So from those last pics and explanations I hope it becomes obvious why yield IF COUPLED with taste and plant health is a very interesting signal of “adaptation”, has a strong leverage for breeding in suboptimal conditions - relatively to the industry standards.
To wrap up :
- this is why I proposed there “plant health” in suboptimal conditions as a potential minimum threshold for selection and the most excellent proxy for “adaptation”,
- and secondly a subsequent coupled yield / taste criteria, also to assess “adaptation” and assess our breeding method comparatively with standard varieties - if not to prove the validity or superiority of our breeding method, by replicating similar protocoles with different species, regions and people over the years.
To confirm and precise those potentials, I will next year :
- Benchmark seeds from those “best of the best” fruits with seeds from also excellent fruits but lower yielding plants, to assess how far that vitality and excellence is transmissible.
- Benchmark with well-known butternuts and other varieties (Musquee de Provence?) from market gardeners friends of my region, buying from renowned organic seed companies, and growing in same type of soil, but with higher inputs and accurate water management
5 Likes
Ola todos, I will be absent from the forum during the next 3 months. Please reach out to me if needed via private messaging, as I’ll access those PMs through my e-mail.
All the best
2 Likes