Description

Sweetnut squash
Cucurbita pepo

Small naked seed squash. Round, 7 to 10 cm in diameter. Green, turning orange at maturity. Bush-type plant. Small naked seeds, very good raw or roasted in the oven. The flesh is sweet and of good quality. Selected by Elwyn Meader in 1960. 90 days to maturity.

Full sun, well drained and rich soil. Direct sowing not recommended. Sow in individual pots 4 weeks before transplanting. 1 cm deep. 60 cm between plants.

Germination: 95% in November 2023
Ecological seeds produced at Catherine’s Ornamental Garden.

Note
Usually, the flesh of naked-seeded squash is rather uninteresting because these varieties are bred for seed production, not for the flesh that normally remains in the field in autumn or is fed to animals. The plants generally become huge and take up a lot of space in the garden.

Sweetnut is rather the opposite: a small plant like a zucchini plant, tasty flesh that keeps well until the end of January, and lots of delicious seeds without hulls, albeit smaller than commercial ones. It was developed by Elwyn Meader at the University of New Hampshire in 1960 to make a naked-seeded squash suitable for all gardens. And that’s exactly what we were looking for!

It was obtained at a seminar on seed production held in Montreal in autumn 2019. Heron Breen, who was working for seed company Fedco in Maine at the time, kept it alive in his personal collection without ever being able to multiply it enough to put it in Fedco’s catalog. He enthusiastically told the whole group about it and offered us some seeds.

Who knows why, the variety has been completely forgotten. No mention in our 2004 500-page “Garden Seed Inventory” from Seed Savers Exchange. A Google search will turn up a mention here and there, but it’s hard to find information and impossible to find seeds on the web… until now!

After our harvest, we sent seeds to Plant Genec Resources of Canada and to American curator Glenn Drowns at Sand Hill Preservation Center, in case anything happened to our seeds. A variety is so quickly forgotten.