posted 4 years ago
So I've been lurking on permies for a while and finally made an account to ask this question, since i cannot find much info anywhere else, does anybody grow squash in the forest? like an actual forest where the trees are 30+ ft tall and the undergrowth barely gets any sunlight,
i started reading about landracing late 2020 after i had been hand pollinating some of my squash that summer and i kind of regretted wasting the time trying to keep certain varieties pure, most of the seeds i planted were from bakers creek, and in 2020 i had a place to plant them in full sun, but i just moved to a place that is mostly forest, this past month i started by planting the squash in small mounds with just 1-3 seeds but only some of them survived, most of them either got eaten (I would find pieces of the seed coat scattered around, i figure some kind of rodent did this, likely a rat) and some of the ones that didn't get eaten as seeds had their stems cut near the base of the plant, The survivors are trying to crawl towards the sunlight (I'll have to post some pictures sometime).
After that i soaked a bunch of seeds of both saved seeds and varieties from baker creek for a day and then would walk around in the forest moving aside some leaves, planting the seed partially in the ground, and covering it back up with leaves, it hasn't rained since i did that about a week ago so i worry that those might've all died from lack of water (I planted over 200 seeds of all sorts in random spots that i did not mark so i can't water them easily)
I'll post some pictures sometime of the squash i harvested last fall.
Im in zone 6b