The Cream Puff Squash

I USED to be a contented gardener. I raised more flowers and vegetables than I could rightly take care of, admired or deplored the results, and ate the edible. Then I came across a magazine article about the new hybrid flowers and vegetables, illustrated with photographs of pretty girls in shorts painting pollen into the hearts of petunias. I read breathlessly a rather sketchy description of the methods of cross-pollination and on to the lighthearted assurance that anybody with a back yard and a paintbrush could become a hybridizer. “The results are always interesting,” the article ended, “and by using proper techniques the gardener can develop new varieties that are always in demand by seedsmen.”

I put the magazine down in a daze — anybody with a back yard and a paintbrush — I had a back yard and a paintbrush; I too could be a Burbank! A whole new world opened up before me; why, I might create some flower or vegetable that no one in the world had seen before.

Snatching a water-color brush, I raced out of doors. The shady front yard didn’t seem to have any subjects for immediate hybridization, but the vegetable garden was at its height, with all those squashes blooming.

I had thirteen different kinds of squash that year. I like squash; it is easy to raise and good to eat and wonderfully diversified in form and color. Starting with two kinds, I had gradually become a squash collector. In our garden there were large squashes and small, straight and crooked, long, short, round, and scalloped. They were green, white, yellow, and tan, striped and mottled, bush and vine, summer squash and winter squash, grown from seed bought fresh every year so the varieties wouldn’t get mixed.

Now all was changed. I walked up and down the rows wondering where to commence mixing them, and slowly I became aware of the humming of many bees: the squash patch was alive with bees. I sat down on the ground and watched them buzzing from zucchini to cushaw to butternut, burrowing into every flower, gathering nectar, spreading pollen, making hybrids by the hundred. I didn’t even need a paintbrush.

My husband is a patient man and usually tolerant of my enthusiasms, but when he saw me tying colored ribbons on the finest squashes, from which seeds were to be saved for my hybrids, his patience edged over toward the side of scorn.

“If it were that easy,” he said, “there would be thousands of kinds of squash instead of dozens.”

How right he was!

I went blithely ahead, scraping and washing and drying the seeds from one squash of each kind, enough to plant an acre, I’m sure. Some of the seeds were as large as shelled almonds, others as small as cucumber seeds. Obviously I couldn’t raise that many hybrids, so I kept six of each. mixed together because they would all be different anyway — it never occurred to me that I might someday wish to know their parentage. I fed the rest to the birds.

Frost blackened the garden and dull November came, and planting time seemed forever far away. I spent the winter evenings reading everything I could lay hands on about plant genetics in general and the squash family in particular.

In no time at all I was lost in a maze of vegetative genealogy. The squash, as everyone knows, is an American vegetable, and it was on the Pilgrims’ dinner table the first Thanksgiving Day. The Narraganset Indians called it askuta-squash, which allegedly means “vegetable eaten green.” In Virginia the Indians called it macócquer. The English settlers called squashes pumpkins, melons, or gourds, according to their fancy, which were pretty good guesses because botanically they are all members of the family Cucurbitaceae, of which the gourd is the head of the house and scattered around above and below the salt are the squash, the pumpkin, the muskmelon, the watermelon, cucumber, casaba, and dudaim.

Only two of my thirteen kinds, the banana squash and the mammoth chili, turned out to be squash. All the rest, zucchini, the English vegetable marrows, yellow crooknecks, and the others that to me had been the epitome of squashness, were really pumpkins. The cushaws were pumpkins too, but they belonged to a different species, It was positively disconcerting to learn that the jack-o’-lantern, which everyone calls a pumpkin, really is a pumpkin. To complicate matters, the true squashes can be crossed with the cushaws, but not with the other pumpkins, while the yellowflowered gourds will mate with a pumpkin before you can say “honeybee.”

Plainly in that complicated family it was a whole lot harder to keep the breeds of squash pure than to cross them, except that keeping them pure was mere maintenance work, while hybridizing, if it succeeded, would be creation of a small sort, even though the bees did the work.

AT PLANTING time I prepared the bed for my hybrids with the greatest care, fertilizing, raking, smoothing the soil. When they came up, I weeded and dusted and waited, hoping and dreaming.

In time they bloomed, they bore, and I never saw such a mess of vegetable mongrels in all my life. Some of them didn’t even taste good. I was so mortified I wanted to pull them all up and put in turnips. On the other hand, I was ashamed to confess total failure, so I passed by them and let the weeds grow.

I never would have looked at them again if I hadn’t needed some odd vegetable to put in an arrangement for our garden club flower show. The first thing I noticed was that stem borers had got into the hybrids and most of the plants were dead, though a few miserable, bug-bitten squashes were lying around. Then on a wretched, scrawny vine I found one small squash that was the prettiest of its kind imaginable. It was the shape of a teacup and not much larger; the top was scalloped and the sides grooved. The squash was ivory white and marbled moss green in the grooves. If I had thought it into being it couldn’t have pleased me more, and I bore it off in triumph to top the arrangement.

After the flower show the little hybrid somehow landed on the coffee table in the living room, and there it stayed. Everyone who came in said, “Oh, where did you get the pretty little squash?” and handled it and, as often as not, dropped it. The cat batted it around; the dog pawed it; I twiddled with it while talking on the telephone. Nothing seemed to damage the little squash.

Toward the end of winter my husband, who had offered neither praise nor condemnation, suggested that since the squash crop had failed we might as well eat that one before it spoiled. I felt sure such a durable thing wouldn’t taste good, but finally on Washington’s Birthday I baked it, noticing then that it stood on its own bottom like an apple instead of rocking and spilling butter as the acorn squashes do.

It was delicious. Then, and only then, I washed and dried and saved the seeds.

That spring, 1950, I planted only the little hybrid. One vine opened both male and female blossoms forty-two days after the seed had been sown, which was not only early but was an outright violation of squash custom, because normally the male blooms arrive first and hang around like street-corner loungers waiting for the girls.

This was the time to use the proper techniques mentioned so lightly in that magazine article, and I was in the garden at sunup, paintbrush in hand, to fertilize the blossoms before the bees contaminated them with pollen from a neighbor’s garden. No flower is more easily hand-pollinated than a squash blossom, because the male and female flowers are distinctly different, and the ovary of the female blossom is exactly the shape the fruit will be. The embryo squashes on this vine seemed to be the right shape, so I dabbed my paintbrush into the pollen of a male flower on the same plant and painted it into the female blooms, hoping the technique was correct. I tied cheesecloth over the blossom and sat back, full of accomplishment, for if the squashes developed they would be not only purebred but inbred as well, and according to the books inbreeding was the only known way to fix type.

The type needed fixing, all right. That year I had a whole catalogueful of squashes: large, small, round, oval; striped green, striped yellow, not striped at all. Even the leaves varied; some were large and soft, some large and bristly, some small and velvety with pretty silver veins. Their blooming time straggled along until frost.

So few reproduced the mother squash, that I tried valiantly to inbreed all that looked right in embryo; but everything went wrong. At harvesttime I had exactly one inbred squash just like its mother, and it, oddly, came from the first vine to bloom.

During the winter I learned that professional breeders often work as long as ten years before regimenting a new kind of squash into uniformity. At least two years of the possible ten had passed, and I had made what looked like progress.

The third year several vines bloomed fortyeight days after the seeds were sown (instead of forty-two), and about half had embryos the right shape. I inbred those with the greatest number of female blossoms and pretty silver-veined leaves. Instead of cheesecloth I tied brown paper, waxed paper, Pliofilm, and even good handkerchiefs over the blossoms — and again ended the season with one inbred squash.

Besides the inbred one, I had a small mountain of open-pollinated squashes, right shape, wrong shape, any shape (about 60 per cent took after their grandmother). Our friends begged for a few, two or three, even one, because in the past we had given them squashes by the bushel. I love to give things away, and finally I gave three squashes to a friend.

Fransje, my husband, was outraged. “I put up with it when you gave the back door away,” he said, “but if you’re going to set up as a back yard Burbank you’ve got to keep those squashes.”

I protested that the squashes I had given away probably had made mésalliances with half a dozen of their kind up and down the road; but Fransje got the seeds, which spoiled the gift and left the recipient convinced that we were both crazy.

After one dear lady tried to swipe the inbred squash, I realized that selfishness was the better part of hybridizing.

The mechanics of hand-pollinating had given me more trouble than anything else, and as we went into the fourth year I thought that if only the neighbors didn’t raise squash I could grub out the vines with improperly shaped embryos and let the bees, who knew their business a lot better than I did, take over. No harm asking the neighbors, I thought.

The first neighbor I approached said indeed she was going to raise squash, she always raised Yankee hybrid and butternut. I offered to buy her all she could eat, but no. It seemed that she sold thirty or forty dollars’ worth of squash in a season. So I went on with the paintbrush.

That summer about 90 per cent of the squashes looked just like their great-grandmother, and 1 ended the season with several that were inbred for earliness (still forty-eight days) and productivity, as well as type. The sudden success in handpollination may have been due to acquired skill or to the discovery of a very thin sort of Pliofilm that didn’t bow down the blossoms. I thought we were doing all right.

THE next year we hit the jack pot. First, the neighbor who always sold thirty or forty dollars’ worth of squash announced that she was tired of doing all that work for a few pennies and intended to plant just a small salad garden. Another neighbor said she never had liked to muck around in the dirt and wasn’t even going to plant tomatoes; a third went to South America. It seemed too good to be true, but Fransje and I explored the neighborhood thoroughly and found there wasn’t a squash or pumpkin within a mile and a half. At long last I could hang up the paintbrush and let the bees bumble.

Every one of the squashes made pretty silverveined leaves; every one opened female blossoms on the forty-eighth day after the seeds were sown. Only two vines in the entire planting developed embryo squashes of the wrong shape, and I grubbed them out.

Long rows of squash loaded with fruit all alike stretched across the garden. After five years the little squash was 99 per cent perfect. It was a beautiful sight.

“You’ve done it,”my husband said respectfully. “Now what?”

“‘New varieties are always in demand by seedsmen,’ ” I quoted airily. “I’ll find a demanding seedsman.”

“Do you really think anyone will pay for a bee’s mistake?” he asked.

The article said so; beyond that I had no idea.

I showed the little squash to a U.S. Department of Agriculture official, who said that, while he thought it might be salable, he couldn’t guess what price an amateur coming hat in hand might hope to get. He added that the cost of developing new varieties by scientific methods might run into thousands of dollars; but in such cases plant breeders aimed at definite objectives, while I had just taken what the bees sent. He advised writing to each of the major seed firms and describing the little squash, and sending one to each of them after removing all the seeds.

Taking the seeds out seemed rude to the point of insult, but I did it and apologized for the discourtesy. Three letters and three squashes went out in a rush, the letters extolling the merits of my pet, even to the pretty silver-veined leaves, which I often used in flower arrangements.

The first answer came promptly from the vice president of my favorite vegetable seed company. The little squash was interesting, he wrote, but too much of a novelty for their market-gardener trade. Wishing me success in selling it elsewhere, he was, sincerely mine. I felt just the way I had the first time an editor rejected a manuscript.

A few days later the second answer arrived, also from a vice president, who said his firm would be willing to test the little squash free of charge, but he thought it was very similar to, if not identical with, a sort originally grown by the Indians and now sold by a seed firm out in the Great Plains. I was utterly dismayed.

“Can it be possible,” I asked, “that the bees and I have spent five years making a squash that the Indians have been growing for centuries?”

”I don’t believe the Indians have got your squash,” my husband said loyally. “Write to the firm that sells the Indian squash and ask for a photograph; enclose a dollar to pay for it,” He handed me a dollar.

Cheered by his hundred cents’ worth of faith, I wrote. Back came a large, glossy photograph of the squash the Indians grew, a lumpy, warty, unhandsome thing that was gloriously unlike my darling.

I forwarded the picture with a “There now!” letter to the doubting seedsman. He apologized for mistaking my pet for the Indian squash, which he admittedly had never seen, and repeated his offer to test mine, adding as a special inducement that we could drive out a few hundred miles to the trial grounds and see it growing.

By that time I wouldn’t have let him plant my squash in the Elysian fields.

No answer to my third letter had come, and after a while I gave up hoping. Nobody wanted my little squashes, and we might just as well eat them.

We had squash for lunch, squash for dinner, and squash between meals, boiled, steamed, baked, and fried, in pie and corn bread. I even made squash preserves according to a recipe that Peter Kalm, the Swedish naturalist, got from the Indians more than two hundred years ago. You peel the squashes, slice them thin, and soak the slices in cold water for half an hour or so, dry them and boil in maple syrup until the squash becomes translucent and the syrup is as thick as honey. It’s good. When we tired of the thought of squash, I packed into the freezer enough to last for years.

The mountain in the kitchen was down to about a peck when a letter arrived from the third firm. A vice president was interested in the little squash and asked forthrightly, “How much?”

That was a poser if ever I saw one. How did I know how much?

We shilly-shallied for months, writing, telephoning, the vice president asking questions: Did I know the parentage of the little squash? Yes, because in the second generation some of my squashes had reverted to two distinct sorts. Was I sure it had no gourd blood? Positive. How many seeds did I have? I didn’t know, there were eighteen squashes left. He seemed disappointed; the price, he said, would depend a whole lot on the number of seeds available.

“We ate a lot of them,” I said weakly, “and I froze the others.”

“Didn’t you save the seeds?” he asked in the voice a man uses when his wife has overdrawn her bank account.

“I fed them to the birds — and the chickens.” I felt as if I had been caught feeding the goose that laid the golden egg to Picklepuss.

He said, “Chicken feed!” and there was a long silence.

Finally we made a deal. In return for all the seeds and a promise not to propagate the squash again, plus all the information I had about it, the firm would send me a check of a size to buy something very modest in mink. And when the squash made its debut in their catalogue, I would get another check of the same size — and at the same time could have two hundred dollars’ worth of anything I wished, seeds, plants, gadgets, bug dust, anything at all that was listed in their catalogue. Imagine having two hundred dollars’ worth of roses and bushes and seeds and strawberries and gadgets all at once!

I indulged in a spell of delirious daydreaming, quite disregarding the vice president’s warning that the little squash could not be introduced to the public until it had been widely tested and a vast amount of seed accumulated — 1956 was the earliest possible date, he said.

I settled down to wait for 1956 — but the trial plantings were washed out in the cold, rainy summer of 1954, and three hurricanes finished the job. I take comfort from the fact that the squash was given a name, Cream Puff, which fits it very well. But I have stopped daydreaming.

Meanwhile the bees and I are crossing gladioli and miniature roses and all sorts of things, because I am still convinced that anyone with a back yard and a paintbrush and a patient disposition can be a Burbank.