Quick 2019 Update

Hello everybody,

It’s that time of year where people are planning their gardens and we have all sorts of new interest rolling in.

On my end I am also planning whats going to be growing this year and started getting the seeds ready for the project. I thought it would be a good time to harvest the seeds from my small (but important) harvest from my personal trials in 2018. I had four good sized fruits, two from butterbush and two from the Lofthouse landrace. I marked them with a sharpie at harvest and set them under the coffee table to mature for a few months.

 

Squash Harvest from 2019. Burpees Butterbush on left, Lofthouse Landrace on right.

Although they made some great curry soup, I have to announce that unfortunately, none of the fruits had viable seed in them.

It appears that they had enough time on the vine to mature enough to keep but did not have enough time to produce fully formed seed… So it is back to variety trials for 2019!!

I will be trialling and distributing all of the same varieties from last year (and maybe a few more) as I do not want to judge the plants performance on a single growing season. An unusually early snowstorm and very cold weather (-16 C) in early September cut ripening on the vine short for me. I also had some issues with keeping the squash as watered as I would have liked to in our dry August so maybe a little more care is in order to get proper seed. Although this sets back the timeline of the project a little bit, I would still consider the first year trial a success because I learned a bit about which varieties may do best in my garden and also learned that there may be a significant difference between the time to harvestable C. moschata and the time to fruit with viable seed.

In slightly more exciting news, the Young Agrarians page has reached out and written a feature on this project to help drum up some interest! Check out their article and organization at Northern Prairie Growers Wanted for Butternut Squash Breeding Project

If you are just learning about the project now, please browse the website and reach out on the Contact page to get more info or sign up for the project.

-Winston