Saving Squash Seeds - An article I wrote a while back

 This is an article I wrote for The Harrowing Times a few years ago. 

“What do you mean, how did I save them?” the man in front of me asks, obviously a little insulted. “I scooped them out and dried them,” I nod my head and take the seeds from him. 

Being handed seeds is always a good thing, especially at a big seed swap like this. Except sometimes… when it’s not, like when someone hands you some squash seeds they’ve saved.

***

Fast forward to later this year, I lament this interaction as I crouch down and look at the downy leaves of my courgette plants, I can see that the fruits are split open. Not only that, they’re decaying, I can smell the slightly sour note as I prod at them with the back of my fist. All rotted. I don’t say anything negative out loud, a lifetime of working mainly alone means I internalise a lot of my thoughts, but really I’m cussing, and probably the really bad words. 

A lot of work goes into saving courgette seed. Or I should say a lot of work goes into saving courgette seed if you’re going to do it right. But what’s gone wrong here isn’t my fault, it’s the fault of nature.  

I’d done everything right. I’d picked a nice summer evening to go out and select flowers, male and female.  I wanted ones that hadn’t quite opened yet. It’s easy to tell them apart, the male ones stand upright and proud, the female ones are normally nearer the main centre of the plant and have a small embryonic fruit that the flower is attached to. I went out and, like some kind of floral cattle wrangler, slipped a jute noose over the ends of these flowers to prevent them opening until I was ready for them. 

This is because all these Cucurbita are quite free and easy with their pollination, you could describe them as promiscuous little blighters, and be well within your rights. Although they can only pollinate flowers in their own group (there are exceptions), generally split into three – Maxima, Moschata, and Pepo, (there are others, but it gets complicated), courgettes are normally pepo. This means that left to their own devices a bee or other insect could cross pollinate the plant for you and what you get might not be what you expect. Normally this is fine, but sometimes it can result in something you’re not expecting (look up “toxic squash” syndrome). So care needs to be taken when saving these seeds, especially if you intend to give them to others. 

You can do it by isolation alone, to grow it in an isolated place, probably three miles away from where anyone else is growing one, to prevent very keen bees. But instead I isolate flowers, tied up like this I’ll go out the next morning and pick the male flowers, I’ll then pluck the petals from one, striping it bare leaving only the stamen showing. Then I’ll carefully undo the string on a female flower and open it out, taking care with the petals this time as I’m going to want them later. 

Now some of you may want to avert your eyes to this next bit, as it’s going to get, well, erm, sexy…

I’ll turn up the music on my phone, Barry White, or something to get them in the mood, and I’ll make the male and female parts meet. Rubbing these parts together will pollinate the female flower, with pollen we’ve chosen. Preferably not a flower from the same plant, but one we’ve chosen one that has all the characteristics we’re looking for. We don’t want to save any from a plant that produces odd fruit to contribute to the gene pool we’re trying to save. 

We also want to save from enough plants to prevent inbreeding depression, this isn’t a huge problem for courgettes and squash, but as someone who grew up in a small town near the Welsh border it’s something I’m probably more acutely aware of… I grew 5 of this variety, and had planned to save seed from each. 

When we’ve done the reproduction act for the flowers we then can tie the female flower back up. What we don’t want to happen now is bee to come swooping in and bring in pollen from somewhere else, so making the flower secure like this is perfect. We also need to mark the base of each courgette we’re saving from, don’t rely on the string on the flower as it will drop off at some point. 

I should also say that you also need to tell the rest of your family that you’re saving seeds and show them what you’re using to mark these chosen few. It can be quite disheartening to come out and find your own mother “helping you” by saying she’s weeded out all those lettuces that have gone to seed, or one of your children has picked the large courgettes to feed to the chickens…

Then all you need to do is wait for the fruit to ripen. This is where I fell down. I thought I‘d left ample time in the year for the fruit to swell and grow, to have hundreds of seeds growing and maturing inside, protected by the creamy white flesh. Instead, what we got was a near month of rain, where the fields around us showed puddles in every tractor tyre track, where crops lay flattened in the field unharvested way past their best. 

***

It wasn’t just the fields and crops around us that were affected, in the garden things weren’t doing so well either. I’ve grown courgettes for well over 20 years, and we always had a patch of them growing up, I can’t remember seeing them split quite so spectacularly open like this before; showing it’s guts to the world as it lies rotting. 

Seed is something we take for granted in the modern world. To be able to buy it cheaply, and have it grow to be what we expect, but it hasn’t always been like this. Our understanding of plants and genetics far exceeds what we had in the past. 

It’s one reason that I worry I offend people when they bring seeds to our seed swap. Most are fine to save, and I love that we have so many growers bringing us so much seed. Each year we fill a good dozen tables with seeds, and there’s a lot of seeds that are very easy to save, like peas, French beans, most (but not all) tomatoes, lettuce. And then there are things like squash which take a little more work.

So when a tub of home saved squash seeds gets handed over to me, I may act like I’m looking a gift horse in the mouth when I ask of the seeds providence. I have a few questions I ask to find out if the person knew what they were doing. 

But we take them anyway, and thank them. No one wants to be told their efforts have been in vain. These will be put discreetly to one side, and not given to the general public to give their time and space to growing, unless they understand that they might not be getting what they bargained for. They can be used for guerilla gardening, and if you’re making deliberate crosses that’s where things get really interesting….