"Neil Jones" wrote in message
...
Gill Matthews wrote:


"Keith (Dorset)" wrote in message
...

We inherited a fresh squash from a friend who was given it by a friend.
We had never tasted squash before and duly roasted and ate it with
Sunday
dinners. It was delicious.

I have never grown squash before, but many other veg. succesfully. Are
the seeds I have saved from the said squash likely to be suitable for
planting next year and so being sure of producing the same variety
(about
30cm / 1ft long and pale brown in colour?

If so, are there any special considerations I should make when storing
the seeds and planting them - presumably initially in pots, in the
greenhouse, next spring?

Thanks in advance for any help,

Most commercially produced squash seed for gardeners tends to be F1
hybrid. this means that each seed has a 1 in 4 chance of coming true if
it
self fertilised and even less chance if it was fertilised by a nearby but
different strain.

This is not correct. F1 hybrids are produced by crossing two inbred
strains.
They thus contain genes with a high level of "heterozygosity" that is to
say
that many of the pairs of genes contain copies that do not match.
This phenomenon creates "hybrid vigour" and is due to the interaction of
many genes. The one in four figure you quote would be the case if only one
pair of differing genes were involved.

You are quite right of course Neil. The point that I was trying to make (I
really should leave figures out of my arguments) is that there was not much
chance of the saved seed coming true to type, and therefore if it was that
particular type of squash they were after, they would be better off buying
the same type of seed than trying to grow it from saved seed unless they had
a lot of space to play around with.

Gill M