Planning Your Garden for Seed Saving, Part 1: Cucurbits

Reader Contribution by Edmund Frost

I just got done carving out a space for Japanese ”White Pear” melons from the weeds between a young persimmon tree and the woodshed. Its good dirt, though someone had put a small pile of rocks there years back. I dug it with a maddock and fertilized it with chicken manure and ashes. Now it’s a small melon isolation plot, big enough for about eight plants.

This is what I do in the evening, when I’m done working with the seed crops in the fields.

The Cucurbit Family: In Need of Isolation

As a seed grower I’m often thinking about how to find more isolated plots for seed growouts, and about exactly what to put in those plots. Some kinds of crops, like cucurbits, need a lot of isolation. The cucurbit plant family, which includes melons, watermelons, cucumbers, squash and gourds, is pollinated by insects. Different varieties of the same species that are planted near each other will inevitably cross because the bees transport the pollen between the flowers. Cucurbit varieties of the same species need to be isolated by at least ¼ mile to prevent crossing. For large plantings, or if there are few barriers between the crops (like trees, or flowering plants) the isolation may need to be half a mile or more.

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