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Post by diane on May 11, 2015 17:04:08 GMT -5
I am going to cross zucchini with delicata, hoping to produce a really thick-fleshed winter squash a few generations hence.
Any internet mention of zucchini crosses has been of accidental crosses and the growers were not pleased with the results but
did not describe them and certainly didn't carry on with a second generation.
Have any of you done this deliberately, or noticed what the results looked like if you had an accidental hybrid?
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on May 11, 2015 18:57:03 GMT -5
I am going to cross zucchini with delicata, hoping to produce a really thick-fleshed winter squash a few generations hence. If I were breeding pepo squash, I would want to make a cross like that... Pepo squash were domesticated twice in different places and times: Zucchini came out of the Oaxacan domestication, and Delicata came out of the Ozark domestication. My brother has a lot of accidental crosses volunteering in his garden. Crosses grow fine... They look great as decorative pumpkins. He eats them sometimes. |
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Post by darrenabbey on May 11, 2015 21:31:00 GMT -5
If I were breeding pepo squash, I would want to make a cross like that... Pepo squash were domesticated twice in different places and times: Zucchini came out of the Oaxacan domestication, and Delicata came out of the Ozark domestication. My brother has a lot of accidental crosses volunteering in his garden. Crosses grow fine... They look great as decorative pumpkins. He eats them sometimes. Interesting. I knew that several squash species were independently domesticated, but I didn't know that C. pepo had been domesticated more than once. Do you have any references that talk about this? |
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on May 11, 2015 23:17:02 GMT -5
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Post by blackox on May 12, 2015 7:07:41 GMT -5
I grew out a cross last year, it was between Black Magic Zucchini and New England Pie pumpkin.
In the F1:
Roughly %50 of plants produced fruits that looked like the NEP pumpkin but with rounded-out ribs and more of a flour scent orange color, they were a little larger than the NEPs. The plants were prolific - the vines and leaves were larger than those of my maxima and moschata squashes and the leaves were held up high above the ground. Normal yet prolific viners and growers. A lot of very stringy flesh, didn't eat but might have been good as a zucchini squash.
One plant produced a small fruit with a flattened pumpkin shape and dark, solid green zucchini color. A small amount of stringy flesh. Didn't eat but ducks did.
The other plants were prolific viners, the vines were very long but each plant had maybe one or two. Very spiny w/ dark green mottled leaves. Produced large grey-green fruits w/ somewhat of a netted pattern that turned a flourescent orange after a long time in storage. The shells were shockingly hard, I could have easily killed somebody with a blow to the head with one of these things. Again didn't eat, but had a lot of stringy flesh. I had originally not intended on saving any seeds, but these are the only ones that I got seeds from.
I let everything in the garden cross pollinate and didn't bag a single blossom. I had also grown bush white scallop squash last year. I had no intention of developing something useful, I'm really just playing around at the moment(I'll pounce if I recognize something useful or interesting in my grow-outs).
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Post by diane on May 12, 2015 10:28:20 GMT -5
That's a lot of variation for the F1 of a cross.
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Post by darrenabbey on May 12, 2015 12:30:21 GMT -5
Squash are extreme outbreeders if you don't actively bag blossoms. The diversity described is completely within what I would expect for the described scenario.
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Post by blackox on May 13, 2015 13:03:32 GMT -5
It wasn't a controlled cross (I didn't sit there and hand-pollinate them, the bees did that for me). There's always the possibility that the crossed seeds came from multiple fruits. I didn't keep very good notes until recently, even now I take them haphazardly.
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Post by darrenabbey on May 13, 2015 14:12:43 GMT -5
Even if all the seeds came from one fruit, the chances of a mixed up mess of crosses is high.
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Post by khumlee on May 23, 2015 2:59:47 GMT -5
Hi Diane,
I saw this cross that you want last year in my field delicata X zucchini, The F2 seeds are available if you want. But the F2 are probably a mixt of back cross with delicata and F1 X F1. But the F1 fruit taste not awful. Maybe many lucky in the F2 fruits
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Post by MikeH on May 27, 2015 3:38:20 GMT -5
I am going to cross zucchini with delicata, hoping to produce a really thick-fleshed winter squash a few generations hence. Any internet mention of zucchini crosses has been of accidental crosses and the growers were not pleased with the results but did not describe them and certainly didn't carry on with a second generation. Have any of you done this deliberately, or noticed what the results looked like if you had an accidental hybrid? Acorinni or Zucchorn - an accidental cross between a Black Beauty zucchini and a Table Queen acorn squash. A VERY undesirable result - tasteless and very dense & hard. We tried it in soup, roasting with other veggies, on the barbecue but it was still nasty. We went as far as to make sure no seeds overwintered in the compost pile.  |
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Post by darrenabbey on May 27, 2015 12:06:17 GMT -5
The F1 was horrible, but some of the F2s might have been fantastic.
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Post by diane on Sept 17, 2018 10:13:23 GMT -5
Hi Diane, I saw this cross that you want last year in my field delicata X zucchini, The F2 seeds are available if you want. But the F2 are probably a mixt of back cross with delicata and F1 X F1. But the F1 fruit taste not awful. Maybe many lucky in the F2 fruits Thank you for the seeds. Every year since, I have grown some but have not yet had any fruit - no female flowers, just males. I'll keep trying. |
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Post by gilbert on Sept 22, 2018 13:55:19 GMT -5
I'm trying this cross this year; I planted a bunch of delicata squash and costata romanesco zucchini. The zucchini did fine, as always. Very few of the delicatas came up, and those which did are not right by the zucchini. But I'll save all the seeds and see what happens. I'd really like a huge, vigorous delicata; they are my favourite pepo squash, but are rather weak, wimpy plants, at least for me in Colorado.
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Post by walt on Sept 22, 2018 14:52:05 GMT -5
This thread has got me thinking.
I love squash, but so do squash bugs. And buffalo gourds are a very common naive plant here, there will always be squash bugs, and lots of them.
A neighbor in town is growing squash in front of her house, and the plants look quite nice. I think many people don't even know she is growing food, not that people would mind. It's just that to many people here, a vegetable garden is a potted tomato from Walmart.
But hybrid zuccinis can fruit (not ripe for seeds) at as little as 41 days, according to the catalogs. Crossing with Acorn, selecting for earliness, and back to Acorn, and again select for earliness, and one might have a pretty plant for my wife's 20 gallon flower pots. And I might have winter squash by mid summer.
Or a cross to delicata might be a way to go instead of, or in addition to, acorn. I have sometimes gotten a small crop of acorn before the bugs kill them. I have never gotten anything from delicata.
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