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Post by terracotta on Feb 25, 2012 14:57:40 GMT -5
how do people select for darker in color squash or watermelon?
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Feb 25, 2012 15:43:28 GMT -5
how do people select for darker in color squash or watermelon? Butternut squash is easy... Take a nick out of the squash after it's picked. Keep the fruits with dark colored flesh. Send the lightly colored fruits to the farmer's market. Then, the day you harvest seeds, cut all the squash open and lay them out on the table. Keep the seeds from those with the darkest flesh. Toss the rest of the seeds. For selecting darker colored skin, I take a sharpie market and go out to the field early in the season and write an X on anything that is much darker colored than the rest of the patch. This usually also translates into darker colored flesh. With watermelon... Go out to the field. Start hacking melons open. Toss any with light colored flesh: Leave them for the wasps to suck all the juice out. Keep seeds from those with dark flesh. That's my strategy. You could be more suave about it by hosting a watermelon eating party, or by opening one melon per day. I do a little of that, but mostly it's the hack method. With cantaloupe, I harvest then cut them open and lay them out together on the table. Then after selecting dehydrate the left overs. |
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Post by jonnyyuma on Feb 25, 2012 21:46:04 GMT -5
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Post by terracotta on Feb 26, 2012 12:01:03 GMT -5
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Feb 26, 2012 12:22:08 GMT -5
I was thinking of getting some of those paint sample cardboard from the hardware store for color selection. Something like that would be helpful for choosing darker fruits if the crop is harvested from time to time rather than all at once... Photos don't reliably reproduce colors, and my memory from day to day about how dark previous fruits were is unreliable. A color chart/wheel would also allow comparisons between years. The trouble would be finding the proper color chart that covers the range of colors in the crop. |
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Post by terracotta on Feb 27, 2012 11:50:25 GMT -5
the computer program called paint found in accessories can create any color you want then you can form it into a chart. Macintosh calls it something different.
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