Have you ever kept two cucurbit populations separate?

Next year, I want to grow a wildly crossing pepo landrace. I’ll be planting, at last count:

  • The Reckless Pepo grex.
  • My spaghetti zucchinis.
  • My tatumes that probably crossed with them.
  • My spaghetti pattypans that probably crossed with them.
  • My spaghetti squashes that probably backcrossed with them.
  • Two thornless varieties, one of which is powdery mildew resistant.
  • Two parthenocarpic, mostly gynoecious varieties.
  • A drought tolerant zucchini that is used to being dry farmed in this area that Lauren shared with me. I’m excited about that one. Thank you, Lauren! :smiley:
  • And some other random varieties that sound delicious and/or early.

My goal is to have squashes that taste good immature, taste good mature, are drought tolerant, and (eventually) are thornless and powdery mildew resistant. Parthenocarpy and gynoecious being common traits that pop up a lot would be nice bonuses.

That’s population number one.

Population number two will be my Candystick Dessert Delicata squashes. I’d rather they not cross with the rest.

Or rather, to be more specific . . . I’d love to have them cross with the rest, but only in one direction. (Grin.) My theory is that zucchinis won’t make delicatas more delicious, but delicatas might do wonderful things for zucchinis. I might even see if I can eventually do backcrossing to get bush delicatas with zucchini high productivity.

So, at least for now, I want to keep my delicata population separated. My current plan is to plant my delicatas as far away from the rest of the pepos as possible (which unfortunately is only about 30 feet away), with a whole bunch of melons in between, in hopes that the bees won’t carry pollen between pepo populations. Meanwhile, I’ll periodically rob the delicatas of male flowers and take them over to the main pepo patch to pollinate any open female flowers I see.

Have any of you ever done something like this? If so, how did it go?

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I observe about 5% cross pollination of pepo squash patches that are separated by 100 feet in a field with a huge honeybee population.

One year, I picked male flowers off a pepo plant every day, all summer long. It worked well for making the cross that I wanted.

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It’s good to hear that worked! My heart fails me at the thought of trying to pick all the male flowers off the non-delicatas daily, which I’m sure would work (laugh), but I could try putting my gynoecious parthenocarpic varieties at the closest end to the delicatas, and removing the male flowers from the normal ones that are the next closest, which may help a bit.

I’m hoping that putting melons in between, which have similar flowers but won’t cross, will encourage the squash bees to visit those in between the two pepo patches, thereby carrying less pollen between them.

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This is great to hear. I’ve been wondering about this recently.

And suddenly it occurred to me that if I keep my gynoecious varieties near to the delicata population, they may get lots of delicata pollen . . .

(Steeples fingers.)

If I save seeds from those, that may get me a zucchini x delicata cross without any real effort! If it’s gynoecious (or mostly gynoecious) and keeps the bush habit, too, that may make for a really interesting cross. Imagine a bush delicata that could be eaten as a highly productive, extra sweet summer squash! Doesn’t that sound yummy?

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