Ansis Klavins

Hey Kārlis,
I sent you a private message about some spare paw paw seedlings I can share

I harvested all my squash before the first major frost.

Here's the group shot of the moschatas


Here are the oriental varieties


I'm not sure how many of those will have viable seed.

The weirdest one is this, none of the varieties I planted are supposed to have fruit like these


Some of the butternut types have some damage on the side that was on the ground, I'm not sure if it will heal or go deeper. Either way, I won't be saving seeds from those.


Finally, my total this year's squash harvest including marrows and maximas

I grew Nanticoke squash last year, it's quite an easy way to get into landrace gardening - very diverse colors and shapes in there.
Quite a bit of variation in taste as well.
Here's what I got from those plants



If you really want to keep things from cross-breeding, then yes, more distance and a barrier of sorts would definitely help.
I think the lemon summer squash is actually a pepo and not mixta, so if possible keep it well away from other pepos.

thomas rubino wrote:
The principle is an ultra hot fire that heats a mass and then it goes out.

Exactly, the idea that the fire needs to burn the whole day comes from cast iron stoves which function in a completely different way.
I don't have a rocket stove, but something like a finnish downdraft masonry stove and most of the heating season it needs to be fired for a 2-3 hours every day or two and the thermal energy accumulated by the brick mass keeps the house warm the rest of the time.

So a quick update regarding blight resistance.
I had a couple of dozen tomato plants from wildling and q-series outdoor and they are all completely killed by blight, none of them displayed any significant resistance.
The interesting thing is that the Neandermatos growing right among them survived with small levels of damage. So there is some potential in those genetics.
Unfortunately none of my crosses made with neander pollen to domestic flowers has any seeds at all.
I guess I'll try again next year with more flowers.

On a slightly related note,I had hundreds of tps potato seedling from all over the world growing this year and less than 10 are alive and healthy, all of them direct descendants of Sarpo Mira. Rest were decimated by blight

I've got millions of the little hoppers like in your photo. Every step I take in grass sends a few dozen jumping in every direction. Never had any problems with plant damage. Have you seen them actually eat your garden plants?

Crt Jakhel wrote: If you share a high ground water table with your 'cides-heavy neighbor then that's likely a problem. Apart from that, having a good shelter belt of shrubs and trees should help a lot. Maybe try hazel and willow?

Fortunately the groundwater table is quite deep - 5 meters or so I'm not concerned about it too much.
The only issue is wind drift from spraying process, that's where the willows should help a bit. They are coming back thicker after cutting down the shrubs along property line, so next year it should be nice and thick.
I've eaten so much conventionally farmed food in my life, that in the long run it probably does not make a difference.

As a sidenote, the most heavy-handed, reckless user of roundup I know is the traditional 'grandma' from the country with a small self-sufficient homestead.
She's 80 now and has grown most of her food for as long as I remember.
I remember from my childhood how she had these tiny, very hard stinging nettles and some weird algae-like growth around her property. Turns out that areas that are extremely oversprayed can't grow anything else!

I agree with direct seeding advice. I just scattered a bunch of store bought culinary poppy seeds in a flower bed and got plenty of healthy plants and flowers.

There is also the issue of nectar production.
Specific plants need specific temperatures and moisture levels to produce nectar. If these are not optimal, there might be no nectar flow even if the field appears full of flowers.
The bees know what they are doing.

The Moschata patch seems to be doing well.
The leaves have picked on a salad green/yellowish hue as the weather changed to colder (or maybe there's a deficiency of some sorts), but seem to be growing fine.



Seems like I will get enough mature fruit of the asian type to save seed from them for this project.
The rest of the seed will go in a separate field.

There is very intense bee activity with one or multiple bees/bumblebees in each flower every morning, so I didn't bother with controlled crosses (lazy)

There's one plant that is throwing these crappy mutant fruit that are half vine/half fruit. I should've culled earlier, but somehow missed it.
I hope not saving seed from it will be enough to eventually eliminate the trait.



There is plenty of variety in the patch.

This one is massive