A locally adapted squash held by the community

It has been a beautiful journey with the Ozark moschata grex, the genetics of which I crossed in 2021 and have been eating, saving and sharing seeds of ever since. For many of you curious about how this breeding project turned out, the results speak for themselves in the people who continue to save, plant and share the seeds each year. I delight in getting feedback of how the plants thrived when other squash died, of the time saved not managing for squash bugs or of the phenotypically diverse squash people get when they grow the seed. In the face of an increasingly changing climate, I fully believe that having diverse, intelligent, locally adapted seeds held by the communities that grow them is a very strong resilient solution. So I will let the squash and the people who grow it do the talking. Here are a few of the faces and forms the squash has taken. This squash grex has travelled far beyond my breeding project. It has its own wings and is held by many.

If you want to breed your own vegetable varieties, I steer you toward Joseph Lofthouse’s book Adaptation Gardening or Carol Deppe’s Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties. My grow outs of the Ozark moschata grex often get sent to Going to Seed where you can find a whole host of genetically diverse seed stock from which to start your trials. I share my seed locally and people of the Ozarks share it amongst themselves. I am not often selling it on this website any longer, but thank you for looking and for your interest.