A Walk Through the Cucurbita Moschata Varieties in Our Patch

The dew was still on everything when I went out this morning, and the coffee was still too hot to drink, so I walked the rows instead of sitting down. Early September does that. The patch has stopped growing outward and started turning inward, and if you want to see what the season actually gave you, this is the week to look. I ended up doing what I always end up doing, which is wandering slowly through the cucurbita moschata varieties and talking to them a little.

They are the reason this patch is still standing.

What the Cucurbita Moschata Varieties Have in Common

If you knelt down and put your thumb against the stem of any of them, you would feel the same thing. Solid. Dense. Almost woody where it meets the ground. That one detail is the whole story of why we grow this family on the Kansas prairie and why so much else in the garden gave up in July.

The squash vine borer lays her eggs at the base of the stem, and her larvae tunnel in and hollow out the plant from the inside. A hollow-stemmed pumpkin has no defense. A solid-stemmed moschata makes her work miserable, which is why these varieties are vine borer resistant and why the rows are still green in September. They also handle heat and humidity better than almost anything else you can put in the ground here. If you want the full explanation of the species and what makes it different, I wrote it out in what cucurbita moschata is and why it matters.

The other thing they share is flesh. Deep orange, fine grained, sweet without being sugary. Every one of these cooks well. That was not an accident of breeding so much as an accident of geography. This family came up through Central and South America and then traveled with people who cared about eating it.

The Cucurbita Moschata Varieties Walking Distance from My Back Door

Start at the west end, because that is where the Seminole is, and the Seminole is showing off. It came out of Florida, where the Miccosukee and Seminole people grew it long before anyone was writing seed catalogs, and it grows like it still thinks it is in Florida. Small buff-tan fruits, vines running everywhere, completely unbothered by anything August did. If somebody new to gardening asked me for one variety to start with, it would be this one.

A few rows over is the Black Futsu, and I stop at it every single morning. The fruits come on a dark, almost charcoal green and then slowly bloom over with a dusty tan as they ripen, like something left out in a barn for fifty years. Japanese heirloom, deeply warted, with a nutty flesh that does not taste like any other squash in the patch. It is the one visitors always ask about. Black Futsu is proof that this family got interesting everywhere it landed.

Past that, the Musquee de Provence is doing its French thing, sprawling and enormous and ribbed so deeply the fruits look like they were pressed in a mold. The Long Island Cheese sits low and flat and pale, looking exactly like a wheel of cheese somebody set down in the dirt, which is where the name came from. The Guatemalan Green Ayote is a long green thing that would look at home in a market in Antigua. The Pennsylvania Dutch Crookneck curls its long solid neck up out of the leaves like it is trying to see over them.

Different continents, different centuries, different kitchens. Same solid stem. Same thumb test. I find that steadying somehow.

Why the Family Keeps Earning Its Row

There is a permaculture idea I keep coming back to, which is that the most resilient system is the one that does not need you to fight for it. I do not spray this patch. I do not wrap stems in foil or inject anything or go out at dusk with a flashlight hunting moths. I picked a family of plants that was already suited to this ground and this weather, and then I mostly got out of the way and kept the soil fed with compost and old leaves.

That is not laziness. It is the difference between gardening against a place and gardening with it. The moschatas let me do the second one.

They also store. Cure them right and most of these will sit in a cool back room into February, which means the patch keeps feeding us long after it looks dead out there. There is something quietly hopeful about carrying a squash in from a January pantry that you watched set fruit in July.

If you want to see the whole family in one place, they are gathered in the Cucurbita moschata varieties collection, and the ones we lean on hardest for borer pressure are in the vine borer resistant seeds collection. Every packet holds 10 to 20 seeds, which is more patch than most people expect.

The coffee went cold while I was out there. It usually does. But the cucurbita moschata varieties in this patch are heavy on the vine and turning color right on schedule, and I came back inside glad about it, which seems like a reasonable way to start a Friday.

From the patch in Newton, Kansas.