I've been breeding
local butternut with kabucha for years, it is my favourite hobby. Also with another local hybrid "boerpampoen". The trick is to bring the kabucha through the first year and get their flowers near your other breeds. The second year you can let the crossbreeds set fruit from each other, and then after that be sure to reintroduce kabucha every second year and your local hybrid every second year, especially if you have less than fifty plants. In other words keep breeding back and forwards, saving seed from only those plants that you like. I am aiming for a plant with the hard outer shell of the butternut, the storage qualities of a boer and the incomparable flavour of the kabocha. What I am getting is a peculiarly local creamy flavour with the dryness of kabucha and the sweetness of butternut.
I order seed from Kitazawa and their seed is excellent.
To bring my kabochas through their first year I plant them at the foot of a wormfarm in 1 m deep sunken hugelbeds. If I can I will also mulch regularly to keep their feet damp, this year it has been so humid that they are getting a bit mildewy instead. I don't treat, just making sure there is plenty of air circulation because I believe in tough love. No matter, after all the only thing i have to do is to get them to produce male flowers that either I or the
bees can cross pollinate from. Usually I will get a couple of fruits a year even from first generation kabuchas, the flavour of which is
enough to keep me breeding.
The Japanese indeed are expert plant breeders and the more of their plants I grow the more I become aware of how species are bred to fit into a plant ecology and human ecosystem. I have been much inspired by
Joseph Lofthouse's experiments and am encouraged to try tomatoes next.
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