guatemalan Green Ayote squash

[meizzwang]

This relatively rare, tropical landrace from Guatemala has just started to become commercially available in the US within the past few years. All of the US sources, as far as I can tell, appear to have the same "strain": they have a butternut squash shape, which suggest they're all likely of the same original source. If you search for pictures of the green ayote on the internet, you'll see pictures of the landrace growing in Guatemala with a wide range of shapes, but they're all shown to have that unique, deep green flesh. Did this green fleshed trait originate from introgression between a green fleshed argrosperma and C. moschata, or is this a mutation that happened strictly within moschata? The jury is still out there.

The original description for the US green ayote strain states that the growers think it's a cross between a tropical pumpkin and ayote (which is why a certain percentage of individual plants don't display the green fleshed trait). That said, I truly wonder why governments make it artificially extremely challenging for the general public to have access to a wide range of strains that are readily available in mexico, central, and south america, whereas in the rest of the world, they're seldom seen. Seeds are pretty easy to clean up and keep disease/pest free.

All that aside, here are some pictures of the Guatemalan Green ayote! First picture is the strain from Baker Creek: despite being fresh seeds, they appeared overly dried up and germination was around 60%. However, so far, their strain has mostly individuals with mottled leaves:


Highly mottled leaves on this individual:





I think the other source that I acquired these seeds from was Experimental Farms network (EFN), will have to double check. Seeds had a very high germination rate, near 100% and were in great shape. That said, there are a lot less individuals with mottle leaves, and I purposely selected only the most mottled looked leaved plants. The reason is if you look at the original landrace plants in Guatemala, they all have mottled leaves. Maybe the phenotypes not displaying mottled leaves is a way to "weed out" the individuals that don't display the green fleshed phenotype? I have no idea. Both my neighbor and I are growing out a few of the non-mottled individuals to see if that's true. Anyways, here's the EFN(?) strain, notice how different the leaves look from one individual to the next:


Some leaves aren't mottled at all:


The earliest fruit on a plant that produced semi-mottled leaves. I'm guessing the early trait came from the original hybridization event (aoyte x chinese pumpkin).


To be continued....

[bboomer]

These look very much like the squash that is very popular in the Southwest and Northern Mexico. Yum!

[Tormato]

It's not a mutation that strictly happened in moschata, as I had a green fleshed summer squash (pepo) show up several years ago, in my garden.

And as for mottled leaves, rxkeith sent me seeds from his "The Monstah" winter squash (a maxima, I believe). One my four plants has mottled leaves.

[meizzwang]

some updated pics of the ayote patch, notice the great diversity in fruit shape and color! With the baker creek accession, there was one individual with a super long stem found (not shown, just pollinated the flower this morning, will post updates in the future).

This is probably my favorite one so far out of all of the individuals, my daughter called it a watermelon! It came from a very runty plant with heavily mottled leaves, the green stripes are much darker on this individual compared to all of the others:


These smaller phenotypes with no "neck" like you'd see in a butternut are also very intriguing. Another plus is that the smaller fruited ones so far appear to be earlier maturing, although a few still haven't produced fruit yet so this generalization is very tentative:


Another smaller fruited individual:


The very standard butternut phenotype, seems like the vast majority of them have this shape and look:


The earliest individual from the baker creek accession. I'm seeing much less diversity in shape with this source:




This individual was the first of all the ayote plants to produce fruit:





Just checked the label, these came from Commonwealth seeds, here's an updated pic of the the patch:


And here's the baker creek ayote patch:

[worth1]

Looks like a watermelon squash.

[Whwoz]

Certainly some beauties there @meizzwang , Especially the first one

[meizzwang]

How do you know when the guatemalan green ayote is ripe and ready to harvest? 130 days from planting, eh? Mine were planted on 4/27/24, so they should all be ready to harvest on approximately September 6th, 2024. For sure, there are many fruit that aren't ready to pick in 2 days, but the 130 days timeframe does give you a good idea of when to at least start thinking about harvesting.

Is there a way to tell just by looking at the fruit that it's ready to harvest? Probably, and I think that would be the best method instead of counting days after planting since environmental conditions can greatly affect maturity dates. Also, assuming the 130 days covers the latest to develop fruit, I don't want the earlier maturing fruit sitting outside in the blazing sun for a lot longer than they have to be out there, as I suspect this might negatively affect shelf life. There's also the issue with pests damaging the harvest. What I can tell you is that between 41-43 days after hand pollination (grown outdoors in coastal Northern California), the skin had an orange color on the soil side of the fruit, which suggests they're fully mature.

One thing that I totally didn't even think about is how with any given patch of squash, the fruit will be at a varying level of maturity depending on when they were pollinated. Most of what I harvested and photographed below were pollinated around 41-43 days ago (I think 45 days from pollination is the general magic number for winter squash maturity), but I still have a lot of fruit that were pollinated 29-36 days ago, so those still have a week or two before they're ready to harvest.

Here are some of the early fruits from Commonwealth seed growers. The diversity on these are pretty incredible, every plant is slightly different! There's more diversity than what is shown, I still haven't picked them all!


Here is my absolute favorite watermelon phenotype. The plant was a runt and only had one fruit. This was used as a male donor for many different crosses, I hope the flesh on the inside is green with this one as there is reportedly a small percentage with orange flesh from this batch:


Stripes/mottling on this small fruit is turning orangish! What you can't tell is how dense these are: the fruit are surprisingly heavy, even with the small ones!


Notice the skin of this fruit is orange on the "sunny" side. Great indication that it's ready, right? Probably not, but I'm not sure yet. I've had a few fruit that turned orange on the portion of the fruit that received full sun exposure, but the "soil side" of the fruit was still white, which made me think they're not yet ready. Be very careful lifting immature fruit up to look at the soil side, the stems will break off from the vine very easily!


This one is pretty darn big! Unfortunately, I don't think it was fully mature when I harvested it, but this will be a great experiment to see if you can harvest them early and still get good quality flesh after proper curing:



Same large fruit, soil side. Notice it's still white, fingers crossed it was mature enough at harvest. I have labeled this fruit so we will know in two months or so from now if you can harvest early like this:


This fruit was from the first female flower, aka the earliest of the batch:


soil side of another fruit. The mottled area is turning orange-ish while the rest isn't. Is this mature? Probably, but we will find out for sure after a good long cure:



Now let's look at the guatemalan green ayote fruit from baker creek seeds. There's less diversity in shape but still some subtle diversity going on overall. Some fruit are much larger than others, some have shorter "necks" while others have longer necks, exterior skin color is darker with some than with others, and one has a super long stem compared to the rest:


Very confident this one was mature at harvest, this is the soil side of the fruit:


Hard to tell from the picture, but the mottling on this one is starting to turn orange:


closer shot of the large, dark green fruit:


Last but not least, the long stemmed individual. Yup, this one was hand pollinated! The challenge with making crosses with genetically diverse landrace squash in general is you know almost nothing about the fruit and the pollen donor at the time of pollination! I guess the strategy is make a lot of different crosses, label everything carefully, and then after eating the squash, you decide which crosses were worthy! This means sampling the fruit from the pollen donors as well, which is a SOB because a lot of the times those plants don't have yet distinctive fruit to tell one plant from another at the time of pollination so you really need a good labeling system from the get go!


to be continued......

[Whwoz]

Some more fabulous fruit @meizzwang . We normally leave all our squash until the plants have collapsed and threat of frost is near.

Seem to recall seeing some discussion about these over on the Open Source Seed Initiative forum, you might want to have a look there

[meizzwang]

some more pictures of the harvest, there's maybe 4 or 5 left in the field.


I really can't wait to crack these open, but my guess is that few, if any of them are green on the inside at this point. They probably green up as the starch breaks down into simple sugars aka after a good cure. For now, we'll just have to marvel at the diversity in shapes, colors, patterns of the exterior:


what the heck is this color?!


Notice the orangey-white coloration on the bottom left of this fruit: even though the rest of the exterior is green, I'm very confident it's ripe enough to pick:


This one is probably ripe enough too, notice the yellow outlining in that white-ish patch where the sun didn't shine:


Love this one, exactly like the photo that Baker creek has advertising their seeds. For sure, no false advertisement LOL


I just picked this one today (sept 18, 2024) and was pretty surprised to see this large of a spot on the underside of the fruit:


This one has a powdery bloom on the exterior of the fruit! So unexpected:


Endless beautiful patterns and colors from this landrace:


mini green pumpkin? That's what it looks like:

[Whwoz]

A fabulous harvest there @meizzwang . Looking forward to hearing your taste and internal colour report (and hopefully a few more photos)