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orrville ohio

i am wondering what was some deciding factors if you wanna cross or self pollinate.

7/6/2016 10:34:30 AM

Norfolk, UK

Caveat. Fellow newbie.

But...characteristics of plants you like (or don't) feature highly.

As an example, I only have two plants. One of them has secondaries every 1.5ft - another has huge gaps between secondaries 2ft +.

Relatively speaking I don't have a huge patch tho - so I've been selfing the one with smaller internodes as i don't want to cross it with the big un. I'd only get a few secondaries before i ran out of patch.

You might look for characteristics like going heavy, thicker walls, more orange. .

Another factor however, is that pumpkins are naturally outcrossers - they don't like inbreeding (selfing) generation after generation. Checking the history of the plant I wanted to self, none of the generations i can see have been selfed - so it should be fine. It i had a seed which had lots of selfing in generations before, I'd steer away from selfing it yet again - it could suffer from inbreeding depression, and not be a great plant.

Sure others with more exp will chip in additional reasons.

7/6/2016 10:54:59 AM

orrville ohio

ok so I have 2 plants 1 is doing awesome, slow grower but big leafs n big vinescreen n the other is fast grower smaller leafs. my worries are that if I cross them I will get the 2 bad traits I don't want in the pumpkin lol. slow grower small leafs. but if I cross them I could get what I wanted. big leaf fast grower. I think it is just a lot of guessing games.

7/6/2016 11:52:05 AM

orrville ohio

o and how big of an impact would cross pollination have between reverse cross pollination? sorry for all the questions I'm still learning lol.

7/6/2016 11:53:21 AM

Colorado

Self your best plant and use it to pollinate the other. Theres no way to know for sure what to do. Don't sweat it-grow em big and enjoy the process.

7/6/2016 12:15:30 PM

orrville ohio

I like that idea. thanks CoJoe. n the funny thing about my one plant that's doing bad is a 2009 wallace relative lol.

7/6/2016 1:39:53 PM

Iowa

Still somewhat of a newbie also. I self if I have a single seed from a good line to give me a bank of seeds to use for crossing.

7/6/2016 10:59:09 PM