Spaghetti Squash

[Lauren]

I want to do a spaghetti squash landrace, so last year I crossed spaghetti squash with pumpkin and zucchini. One of each grew and fruited. I haven't tried the pumpkin x yet, but the other acted just like a spaghetti squash, but with the initial coloring and shape of the zucchini. It ripened to the normal orange. Next year I'll plant the F2's next to each other.

I learned something interesting today that makes me wonder. Apparently the "stranding" of the spaghetti squash is created by a specific recessive gene (sp) which theoretically wouldn't exist in the pumpkin or zucchini populations. According to what I read, spaghetti squash would almost require an inbred population in order to retain its expected behavior.

I can't find anything indicating whether this is something specific to this variety, or if it might be in all pepos to various levels. Any ideas?

[Ocimum]

No idea, but I had a similar idea but with introducing the hullless gene into spaghetti squashes, to have a dual purpose one.

[Lauren]

For some reason I thought the hull-less trait was a maxima trait, even though I knew it came from a pumpkin.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225304052_On_the_genetics_and_histology_of_the_hull-less_character_of_Styrian_oil-pumpkin_Cucurbita_pepo_L

[Ferdzy]

From eating a lot of squash, it's plain to me that with poor conditions or careless seed saving, pretty much all squash can become unpleasantly stringy. Spaghetti squash takes that unpleasant stringiness to a logical extreme, with the result that it is so bad, it's good. That's my theory anyway.

One of my big complaints about spaghetti squash: the ones I've grown in my own garden have been good (as have been, I think, farmers' market ones). The ones I buy at the grocery store have been so frequently poor that I don't even bother any more. By poor, I mean they are not super stringy, but have soft flesh interspersed with the strings, leading to a dish of mushy, stringy squash instead of something spaghetti-like. I do not know what makes the commercial ones so sucky. Poor quality seed source? Sub-optimal growing conditions? I'll say lack of educated consumer feed-back, for sure.

Because spaghetti squash exists at an extreme end of squash traits, I'm not sure it's ideal for the landrace idea. But obviously I think there is some room for improvement there, so worth playing around with it. I have never bothered trying to save seed as we grow so many pepos, and my impression of multi-crossed pepos is that they frequently revert to the lowest common denominator, otherwise known as lousy.

[Lauren]

It's something I have seeds for, and a variety of squash the people around me like. So I figure it's worth a try.

I don't want an inbred variety, though, hence adding in the zucchini and Pumpkin genes. Hopefully I can stabilize to something more robust that will actually thrive here but has the same traits.