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"Wild" Pumpkin Vine Question
"lwhaley" wrote in message oups.com... OK, I don't know whether or not the squash will be green. What I should have said is we don't know what color it will be. I did say it would likely be green since this was a possibility previously mentioned. Green is a color which is possible. Likely may have been an innacurate adjective. I should have used possibly. To JoeSpareBedroom: Actually I did not suggest successful cross pollinations were impossible. I did not use the word impossible at any point in my post. Quite the opposite in fact. I said that they were notorious outcrossers. The word successful, in my mind, would only refer to the production of viable fruit and seed. While the vine will produce fruit and seed, it will not produce squash that is like the parents unless it were grown either in isolation or by performing hand pollinations. It is still successful from the standpoint of producing fruit and seed. We don't know anything about this seed including whether or not it is even a pumpkin. What we do know is that it will product some kind of fruit and seed, given a chance. What kind of squash it will produce is unknown. Anything is possible. It is also possilbe that it will grow squash that is true to type if the seed was originally grown in isolation. We can never know in this case because the orignial type is unknown. In the case of field pumkins it would be entirely possible to get a pumkin since they are grown in large field and probabley not many other squash nearby. This would qualify as isolation. We cannot know one way or the other since the origin of the seed is entirely unknown. All squash or pumpkins are edible, more or less. Whether or not they will grow true to seed is the point I was making. "Successful" would really be in the eyes of the beholder. The plant is successful if, as you said, it makes viable seed. It doesn't give a hoot whether we find it edible or pretty. Or, does it? There's a fascinating book called "The Botany of Desire", by Michael Pollan. It suggests that although we think we're controlling things when we create new hybrids, it may be the other way around. We find plant variations which please us, and then, we provide optimal conditions for them to prosper. Who is being trained? |
#17
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"Wild" Pumpkin Vine Question
Elaine wrote:
OK lets say this is the only pumpkin or squash around in the area for pollination purposes and the vine has male and female blooms which the bees pollinate. Wouldn't it go back to whatever it's "parent" was? Answer: maybe. The seedling will NOT produce seed that is true to type unless the seed ITSELF was produced in the absence of another variety of squash. So, the seed will produce fruit like the parent if no othe squash was present at the time it was originally pollinated. If there were no other varieties present then it would indeed "go back" to it's original type. I know that gourds are like that (other than they are pollinated by moths at night). If you are growing one type of gourd you cannot grow another type within several miles of each other due to cross-pollination and end up with whatever weirdo. Squash, pumpkins and gourds are all in the same family and can pollinate each other. When this happens the fruit will be as expected (true-to-type) but the seeds, if planted, will not produce true-to-type squash. It will be a squash, for sure, but it will not be the named variety that you started with. It will reflect the grab bag of genetic material that the varieties involved were originally bred from and every seedling could be as different from each other as they are from the original variety. If you are not growing for seed then there is no need to be worried about such things. If seed production is the goal, however, care must be taken to avoid accidental pollinations. |
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