I want to hear more about your squash breeding techniques and how you came to it
So there was this Global Pandemic...
When I was growing up we always had a big garden. My mom likes plants a lot. So I very much like the idea of gardening, especially for things like tomatoes, which are so good when you grow them and so bad when you buy them, and zucchini, which I enjoy eating but don't believe anyone should ever spend money on.
In 2017 I acquired a human child and it turns out those are really good at sitting in the dirt and destroying all in their path, and also I stopped going to work every day, so my garden got better. And also I discovered that peas are super easy to grow and also small children enjoy eating them off the plants.
Simultaneously, the Other One loves pumpkins. LOVES pumpkins. Every year we go to the Pumpkin Show and it's great. I realized also at some point that I can just look at pictures of pumpkins all the time AND due to the wonders of tumblr I can make that everyone's problem.
The best pumpkin posts on tumblr come from @pumpkin-patch . Everything I know about pumpkin growing I learned from them. I don't do it nearly as well, nor as diligently. Things like:
The difference between male and female flowers (female flowers have more things inside and a little pumpkin on the outside)
How to hand pollinate (it turns out the stamen of a male flower is literally a perfect pollen applicator so just... use that)
The fact that the flowers only stay open one day
Pumpkins need a lot of water (more water = more pumpkin)
Pumpkins stop growing when they start turning color
Pumpkins need heat (apparently the seeds want to germinate in soil temperatures of like 85 degrees F)
How to make steel cages to protect your plants and fruit
Pumpkins need plenty of space (I ignore this)
Anyway. In 2019 I guess I bought a pumpkin. And then it was December and I was like why do I still have this pumpkin? I should cut it open for the delicious seeds. But I did and they were all growing. And I was like ... it is December what do? And I thought: if this pumpkin were wild, it would have started decomposing in October or whenever and that would keep the seeds warm until they germinate in spring, right? So I said: what the heck, and I took it outside and buried it in my zucchini patch. And it grew some vines and those vines grew two nice jack-o-lantern pumpkins, Fence Pumpkin and Woodrow.
Then we had this global pandemic so I had nothing to do but sit at home and work on the garden. And by work on the garden I mean obsess over cushaws. So @sireenica bought a cushaw at the pumpkin show because she's a madlad, especially about plants, and she gave me a packet of random mismatched seeds (because she's a madlad), and I accidentally spilled those seeds on the ground, because I am clumsy, and I thought "what the heck why not" and left them there, because I am lazy. And the ones I spilled next to my porch grew giant cushaw vines that tried to eat my house and were the focus of my lockdown activities. And the ones I spilled in my zucchini patch grew random assorted things like tiny little yellow acorn squash and an unidentified thing that I named the Only Lonely Pumpkin, who became the mother of my guerilla pumpkin patch.
The deal with the Only Lonely Pumpkin was that there were no male flowers on the vine the day it opened, but it was so perfect and round (and it was 2020 so I had nothing better to do than go out and hand pollinate squash flowers every morning). I had two other pumpkin vines though - the ones that grew Fence Pumpkin and some sugar pumpkins I was trying to grow totally unsuccessfully (but they had male flowers). So again on @pumpkin-patch 's advice I hand pollinated with both of those - they said the ovary would accept the more compatible pollen.
The other think in 2020/2021 is that's when I got into iNaturalist and started learning my local plants. And one of my local plants is garlic mustard, Allaria petiolata, a class A noxious weed. So I got really into pulling out all the garlic mustard I could find. And there was a little dead patch across the street that was nothing but garlic mustard so I decided to rip it all out, which was a ton of fun. But then I was like well I've done this much work I may as well see if I can plant anything there, so I also cleared out all the honeysuckle stumps and picked up all the trash, and then I planted the sprouts from the Only Lonely Pumpkin there and they grew phenomenally well because it was full sun and the deer didn't go there because it was too exposed, and now that's my guerilla pumpkin patch.
I've got another post with pictures of all these beautiful girls here. My best pumpkin in 2021 was Koko and I saved all her seeds and so she's the parent of all my 2023 vines. (And my 2022 vines but those got sprayed and I didn't get any pumpkins)
So my squash breeding technique is basically "mess around and see what happens." I heard somewhere that pumpkins like milk, so whenever my milk goes bad I dilute it with water and then pour it out in the guerilla patch area. @sireenica breeds rabbits so she sometimes brings me rabbit dung to improve the soil. I should probably get better at fertilizers and composts and things. I know potassium is supposed to be important? I run around hand pollinating everything and sometimes it works. I make the Offspring check for squash bug eggs. I save way more seeds than I can ever use and actually label them. (I ordered a jillion little kraft envelopes one time and now I am unstoppable). And I aggressively post about it online and people give me enough positive reinforcement for doing that that it's become kind of my Thing.
But yeah definitely a lockdown project that got out of hand. Also it helps to live in a place where it rains.
Noticed this morning. Probably just weeds, but I love them anyway... all tiny and pretty. #thingsseenalongtheway #tinyyellowflowers https://www.instagram.com/p/CBdOX68nT7x/?igshid=ysaus6kzvcv6
