[From Thinkific Community]
2022-10-12T07:00:00Z
I’ve been intrigued by landraces before i knew the word. My first gardening expériences led to dissapointments. My friends told me i had to enhance the soil. I wondered why they don’t sell seeds that do well on shitty soils.
Fast forward twelve years. I try landracing. Try i say, because i have limited time, but happily community is of equal importance and here i fiund it.
Forever Grateful to Joseph Lofthouse for writing his extraordinairy book. Which i recommend everywhere. But nobody seems to have the vaguest idea what on earth i am speaking of. Sad sad.
But anyway. Here is one of my projects.
Pumpkins.
I call thèm that because Moschata and stuff confuse me. I have gathered they rarely cross. And if son. It’s a lucky strike. I keep the climbing zones, pepitos i believe, out of the way(ish). The terrain i work on is twentyfive by eighty mètres. Lets say seventy five by twohundred fourty feet.
I try to get selfsustainable(ish) and it’s not going bad. Especially since i’ve only had crazy record drought and heat and cold and wet years since the big project started in coopération with my neighboring dairy farmer friend Jean-Luc.
I grow my pumpkins in composted manure. My previous expérience without compost led to small thin fleshed not very sweet pumpkins with a great amount of very big and healthy looking seeds.
I have started anew after a seed swap two years ago, people gave me seeds which all were the best ever they all said. I mixed this with seeds i got from the local bio store and friends et voilà.
I’ve selected the best ones suitable for me.
The very best where a type small ,yellowish/ orange zoned with a characteristic white stripe on the side.
They had bas seeds the guy at the seed swap promised me but the best taste.
It was all true. Non i planted popped up to my big dissapointment.
But strangely enough they have fathered most of the succesful pumpkins i have managed to grow in this extremely hot and dry summer without almost any rain for a whole of three month period in which i hardly watered.
They look the same only more yellowish and a lot bigger.
I’ve not opened one up so far, so i don’t know about thickness juiciness and colour of flesh, taste or sweetness. Nor if they have viable seeds, but it can’t possibly be any worse than their father flower’s sister pumpkins. If i say that right if you even get what i mean.
They look like this.
Others look like this.
. We will share genetics! Actually I haven’t had any problems with moschata those two last years (maybe it’s due to the fact that it is hotter in here than in your place: I have from 5 to 7 months without freezing. Or it’s due to the fact I made transplants, transplanted around the 20th of may) : this year about 20 varietes jumbled up and I had at least 1 fruit per variety. I will start selecting for taste only from next year.
