Klaus Brugger loves pumpkins. In particular, he loves a certain flesh quality and the nutty flavour in winter squash, and because he is a curious type and a passionate gardener, the Austrian wondered whether he might be able to make his perfect pumpkin. I know this because his Instagram account (@klaus_brugger), which is full of pumpkin pinups, is documenting this journey. It’s a brilliant educational tour of how to go about creating your own vegetable varieties on a small scale.
Brugger has decided his lot in life is to improve the field pumpkin, Cucurbita pepo, in only 250 sq m of land, just outside Vienna in Austria. The aim being to “downsize the fruit, so you get more fruit per plant in a shorter season,” he explains, “but with really great flesh quality that is tolerant to disease. I also like the idea of more orange to the skin colour.” So he took a handy-sized orange pumpkin, ‘Jack Be Little’, and crossed it with a wonderfully flavoured heirloom winter squash from Italy, ‘Tonda Padana’. Then he back-crossed it with a Japanese variety known for its waxy bloom, and now he says he’s “beginning to get somewhere”.
In his late teens, Brugger came across Carol Deppe’s influential book Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties and finally got it: “If you want a variety with certain characteristics that are not available, you have to do it!” He is not alone in wanting his own pumpkin; he’s part of a growing band of independent breeders creating the flavours of the future. Plant breeding can be complicated and scientific, using gene-splicing and the like; but there’s a simpler side that’s been going on for as long as we’ve been gardening. If you can grow a pumpkin, you can breed one: take two pumpkin varieties that you like and cross-pollinate the flowers by hand, then isolate the flowers from further pollination, grow the pumpkins to maturity and collect the seed. The next year, sow that seed and select the pumpkins that represent the traits you are looking for. Then stabilise the population, by further selecting and often back-crossing, until you have a pure-bred pumpkin.
In the UK, Kate McEvoy and Ben Gabel at Real Seeds have set up the Breed Your Own Squash project. For £2.39, you get 12 seeds and a chance to create your own vegetable. Many heirloom varieties were bred by ordinary folk, our great-grandparents, saving seeds. We need diversity in our vegetable gene pool because no one knows what a future climate will be like. “I like to think in my backyard are the heirloom varieties of coming generations,” Brugger says. They could be in your garden, too.
.jpg?w=600)
