Only to enhance the weight of edible pumpkins I grow AGs.
I was encouraged through some pictures from Sacramento, where Scott Henkin could not spend so much time to grow his AGs, but some AGs were overgrown and pollinated by bees. He had some cinderella-like fruits and enjoyed to eat them. These pumpkins are good for our affected biliary sytem, I thought and so I grew an accidental product from the Seattle area (Ashcan´s diary 2012) which had a dumpling at the blossom end like C. maxima turbaniformis. Yesterday I opened the greatest fruit: it had 52 lbs. on the plant in late Ausgust and 49 lbs. when harvested. Today I worked it up and cooked a soup: this pumpkin has the flavor of oranges when cooked! Cause flesh at the blossom end is only 1" thick but more than 4" at the other side, I think the mother fruit form the state of Washington might have been pollinated by a buttercup pumpkin. No dumpling of the mother fruit was seen on any of my fruits, but a sink was around the blossom. The Turban-dumpling on the mother fruit was so big, cause it was affected by Aspergillus niger, a fungus that very often makes such connations. When i got the seed in November 2012, it was heavily affected by A. niger, and I could only preserve a few with food chemistry. Ashcan lost all of his seed. Only one of my plants survived the snail attacks. All of the June fruits aborted fly-blown (peacock fly). But on Independence Day I selfed and sprayed flower and fruit with Autan. This fruit we savored today. We have nice seed now to send back to the USA and name it Cucurbita maxima SHenkin style and our fruit especially `B52 pumplobster´ cause of the fruit weight and the dark orange to red color...and cause the grower of the mother fruit works for Boeing.
We want to encourage many other growers: do not only grow AGs like an addict only for records! But use them to grow fine food with C. maxima turbaniformis `Buttercup´ as pollinator... to grow the SHenkin style.
