Cross pollination Squash & Pumpkin

[Westi]

I was fighting through the foliage today to check on my Pumpkin bed & all the baby fruit is yellow, some with a white'ish stripe. I have one of each of a wide variety planted, QLD Blue, Casper, Turks Turban, Butternut etc. I know some do start with yellow fruit but surely not all of the varieties? Do you think these have been cross pollinated? These are new seeds not my saved ones as I was thinking of the risk as my collected ones are several years old. There is one courgette at the end which is growing correctly, but it is the standard green.

I know I am probably over reacting but I hedged my bets & sowed some of my saved seed in corners around the plot just to try to get a harvest, but probably too late unless we have a warm Autumn. I was chatting to one of the neighbours who said he had heard that the seed companies had acknowledged they could have contaminated seeds but I've not seen this anywhere.

Thanks as usual!

[snooky]

Evening Westi,
If your Pumpkins/Squash have cross-pollinated then I would suggest that it will show up in the seed,if you save it for next year,and not in this season's fruit.

[Geoff]

I believe you can get off flavours in cucumbers by cross pollination but I would agree with Snooky for squashes. We have for many years grown several different varieties of squash in a 'triffid' bed surrounded by a fence to stop them attacking passers by then just collected the fruit when the foliage dies down and had all the different types we expected. I'll have to have a look tomorrow to see if the immature fruits look similar to each other.
Did you sow all you had? The seeds of different varieties vary quite a bit.

[Westi]

Thanks Snooky & Geoff,

I gave them more room this year with is why I am probably noticing them as usually hidden under a mass of foliage. I had a look today & they are not the same shape just the colour. Oh well if the new sow is successful I will have an awful lot, but they store well & the neighbours are always grateful along with the food bank.

[tigerburnie]

Insects cross pollinate every plant in the wild pretty much, as has been said, it's only a problem if you try saving seed, I created a very nice hybrid Cayenne/Hungarian Hot Wax pepper by using the same little paint brush to pollinate flowers under glass. I joke about having two brushes so I don't get chillie flavour Strawberries when doing my bee impersonation on the perpetuals under glass.

[oldherbaceous]

Just pulled a couple of massive plants up….I thought they should have been self set marrows but, turned out to be a cross of some sort, huge plants but just half sizes marrows on them!
Another few self sets are cropping well, with beautiful marrows being produced.

[Westi]

Where they saved seed or new seed OH? Just asking as once again it was mentioned on the plot about some seeds released this year which were affect by cross pollination. I did google it, but found nothing.

[oldherbaceous]

Morning Westi, the seed came from my home made compost, and where I had chucked some big marrows that I had missed last year…

[Westi]

Hi OH!

I searched about which pumpkins start yellow & it normal for those from the Cucurbita Maximas family & apparently there are 36 species in this family including red, green, grey & yellow mature ones. I obviously never noticed when they were in the smaller bed & pretty much all covered with foliage.

[Primrose]

Sounds as if there will be some rather weird items around on vegetable plots this year then. My squash growing experiences have been rather limited over the years due to lack of growing space but I don't think I've ever harvested 100% of what I've wished for. They're certainly a very unpredictable species.

[Westi]

Just to reassure myself I took some pics today to confirm that the plants were different shapes & I can report they are different. I will only post the one pic which is pretty definitely going to be a QLD Blue when it grows up, but I can also see now another one is elongated at the stalk end so Butternut probably & one with a dark green bottom so maybe a Turks Turban?

I am definitely going to have too many after my panic re-sow, but as late some will not mature, if not food bank & neighbours will be happy.

KzhIQHdhTWGzqB6DW4pbnQ.jpg (2.05 MiB) Viewed 3092 times

I was so blasé when younger this would have confused me but also excited me, so I would be looking forward to any type of harvest; but now as it's harder work to do the soil prep I want some sort of guarantee/reward for the aches!