greg mosser

yep, it’s a vertebrate of some kind.

not all of them! there was an improved waltham butternut, a couple kinds of thai pumpkins (originally from baker creek seeds - the originals were very long season, and their offspring are a bit less so but still pretty long), and maybe another two loosely butternut-type that i can’t remember. year three or four there were also some lofthouse medium moschata mix added in sparsely.

i think i must be on year 9 or 10 now. i may start dividing the groups into loosely pumpkin-shaped and necked groups in the future sometime, but ‘all together now’ has been working just fine so far.

this landrace has been going for quite awhile and i have lots of seed. i have a lot that i took decent notes about, so i could theoretically tailor seed to particular shapes/sizes. not totally sure what you mean by brown flesh, hugo. i’ve been selecting for deep orange flesh, though.

by all means contact me for seed via pm. i won’t have much of this year’s seed ready to go for a while, but seeds like the ones that grew those squash i have piles of.

family portrait of most of this year’s moschata landrace. notably missing are the three big thai-style pumpkins on the big vine that volunteered out of my composting area this year, which are currently hanging 15 feet up from the top of my derelict hoop house, and a handful of small-to-medium sized squash whose vines died early and had already been harvested.

something to remember is that you won’t always get an egg per chicken per day. they stop laying to molt (and will likely all at once if they are the same breed and age), and even during normal times when every chickens’ laying is ‘on’, individuals will take a day off when their last egg was later in the day. if you really want to be getting 5 eggs a day, (also what my family tends to eat, plus baking), you’ll probably want more than 5 birds.

i like that book.

you’d need scion wood from an improved variety for it to really help. maybe finding the most productive local tree and grafting its material around, if you’ve got a number of the right size honey locust trees to graft onto, could up your production.

generally, one doesn’t ‘just graft’, grafting is done to add (or increase) a specific variety, a specific genetic individual.

groundhog fat is the worst part (once the scent glands are out of the picture), so i’ve found them better eating in the spring.

the trouble of trying to fit one of the ultimate perennial staples into a modern diet!

they get a gentle sweetness when roasted, that may seem a little weird if you’re used to plainer starches (grains/pasta/taters), but they can great in some of the same ways. chopped with gravy on ‘em? yes, please!

chestnut stuffing is a classic.

you can definitely knock it back with a mower.  i have it in the ground along one side of my garden fence and haven’t had problems with it getting out of hand yet. it comes up in 10 or 12 places every year and i can select which ones to chop and which to favor.

the flavor is pretty powerful. maypop curd (a la lemon curd) is amazing.

looks like maybe roselle? the calyxes around the flowers are used for tea, either dried or fresh.