Curtis Showell varieties

[Alan]

A quick update, I recently put in a request with a couple seedbanks around the world and think I will have aquired a majority of Curtis Showells collections of rare squash, watermelons, and culinary melons. This is a treasure trove of material and in time I plan to grow, save seeds, make selections, breed and distribute all of this material over several years to the Homegrown Goodness gardeners here. This is exciting.

I also requested a number of accessions of otherwise previously unavailable material covering an extensive range of food crops, trust me this will be some amazing material and I am proud to let you know that all of you will have a chance to grow this in your gardens in coming years.

[canadamike]

Culinary melons as in oriental types? I think you should explain this a little bit more. Iam afraid to say I do not have the privilege of knowing anything about mr. Showell, but no doubt he is deserving of respect if you think so highly of him. A little more details would educate us all...

[Alan]

I don't know why I wrote cullinary melons, I actually meant melons of all types, muskemlons, cantaloupes, ext.....


I will update the info on Curtis Showell shortly, he was the Ben Quisenberry of Melons and Squash though.

I also ordered some strawberries too.... chi.......well you know

[grungy]

Yay! Thanks Alan. May we live long enough and be in good enough health, to grow even half of what we want to try.

[canadamike]

Well Grungy, with the amount of stuff we're sending to each other or will soon, that should be pretty much done by next June or so

But then this is not a reason to buy your coffin right now, despite all the sales around in this economic crisis...

[Alan]

A Tribute (seeds of change newsletter number 1)

...to a Guardian of Garden Diversity, Curtis Showell is a tall, lanky farmer who lives on his family's land in Bishopville, Maryland; born in Virginia, he has lived in this area for nearly forty years. The land he works has been worked by several generations of his ancestors. "I got three bloodlines. On my dad's side of the family, I come from the Wooster Indians. On my mom's side, well, she is basically the same tribe Pocahontas was." (The third line is African-American.) With a wide interest in all of the cucurbits (except cucumbers), Curtis has amassed a world-class collection of seeds; it is a collection orchestrated by a self-taught genius. As a child, Curtis was taken with the growing of food. The family garden has always been a source of pride.

I started out when I was a kid. I was about eight years old. A seed catalog came to our house, and we ordered seeds for the family garden. The next year when the catalog came I noticed that some of my favorite varieties had disappeared out of the catalog. There wasn't a thing wrong with them. A lot of them were superior to these today. They had better flavor and their keeping quality was good. With some of the new stuff, the keeping quality is not that good and the taste is overrated. So I started collecting-no one else in the family, just me. I guess it was my instinct; after I had seen the disappearance of seeds, I said I had better hold on to this here and stop wasting it. I have been collecting and growing ever since. I think they should be preserved for the next generation." The list Curtis maintains is overwhelming: over a thousand varieties of squash and pretty close to a thousand varieties of melons. He uses the best criteria that any grower can when choosing which seed to collect and grow: taste. "I test them by eating what I grow and letting other people sample them too, to see if they agree with what I say. Of course, I have to pretty near shoo them away when the crops start to come in," Curtis says with a chuckle. In an age of ever-growing complexity, we are lucky to know gardeners like Curtis Showell. (Shown here, Seeds of Change Malali Watermelon seeds.)

Long Island Cheese Pumpkin (from liseed.org)

The cheese pumpkin is a moschata squash. Just like the butternut, neck pumpkins and the calabaza squash that are featured in hispanic markets. Cheese pumpkins are not all the same. There is; in fact, as much variation in cheese pumpkins as in butternut squash. Yes, there is variation in butternuts! Cheese pumpkins are, according to Native Seed Search of Tuscon, AZ, one of the oldest squashes to be domesticated and selected for food and animal feed. The ripe pumpkin is nutrient rich and bright orange with beta carotene. Of all the squash, they tend to have the smoothest flesh and lack the stringiness found in most pepo pumpkins; they are also known for their high sugar levels. They also have the distinctive butternut tan coloration in most cases.

The cheese pumpkin was available through many seed retailers through the 1800's and into the 1960's. But then suddenly, it disappeared. Some retailers listed the Kentucky Field or Dickinson pumpkin instead, which is also a moschata species and shares many similarities with the cheese except that they are oblong and not shaped like a flattened wheel of cheddar.

It is the watermelon-shaped Dickinson and similar hybrids (that roll better on the conveyors and lack the pesky ribbing that would make peeling more difficult) which are raised in the midwest and keep the canned pumpkin industry going. Libby's knows a good pumpkin and the cheese pumpkin is the granddaddy to those modern processing types. There were farms that raised the cheese pumpkin not too far from where I grew up near the middle of Long Island. Every year, in the fall, we visited them when it was time to make pumpkin pies and the beauty of these big pumpkins left an indelible impression on me. I guess that's why I began to collect the farmer saved strains that were abundant on Long Island in the 1970's and 80's.

It's especially because these pumpkins were no longer in commerce that there was the diversity I found. Each isolated farmer in a remarkably short time, was able to select and create their own distinct variation. The variation was impressive. There were giants over 25 lbs. and little round 5 pounders. I lost almost all of the many strains I found and collected after Long Island Seed ceased operation. Fortunately, one of my favorite variations, the Cutchogue Cheese pumpkin is still circulating among the members of the Seed Savers Exchange and in a strange bit of fortune, the genetics of the Long Island cheese pumpkins is preserved in the seed available once again from a number of seed retailers. One day when Long Island Seed was still operating, a squash and melon collector and seed breeder, Curtis Showell who raised seed commercially for a number of retailers called me with a request for an unusually large amount of cheese pumpkin seed, enough seed to plant an acre. I sent 4 different separately labeled strains of the cheese pumpkins including "Long Island Cheese" which I was working on at the time. Shortly after, Long Island Cheese appeared in the seed trade. You can still see some of the variation within that variety probably because it was crossed with the other cheese pumpkin variations. And if you want, you can select out of it your own farm specialty or family heirloom.

[johno]

That was a good read. Thanks Alan!

[bunkie]

interesting man alan. really makes one realize how important it is to save one's seed. thanks!

[Alan]

Thanks Johno, and I agree Bunkie, it is very important. I wish I could find some more information on Curtis, but links on the net are few and far between, you would tend to think that the SSE would have a permanent home on their web-site for collection donators as I do believe some of Showells varieties did end up there, unfortunately it doesn't seem that this is practiced.

If I find any further info. I will post it here along with a list of what I was able to obtain.