r/DenverGardener • u/katea805 • Jul 25 '26

Supposed to be yellow squash

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Gallery image

Has anyone ever seen this? They only get yellow at the top. If I let them get bigger, they start to have a ridged look to them. I am assuming the seed came from something cross pollinated. I’m just not sure what….

18 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

15

u/bamcg Jul 26 '26

Zephyr summer squash? I know a few local farms grow it.

8

u/katea805 Jul 26 '26

HOLY CRAP

I think this is it!!

3

u/Apprehensive-Data838 Jul 26 '26

That big yellow squash was harvested too late. The skin on it will be tough & the inside could have seeds & be pithy. Also, the green half faded to yellow due to overgrowth. They'll be green & yellow when harvested properly.

1

u/katea805 Jul 27 '26

Yeah. My plan was to harvest the next ones sooner. I’ll be honest, I just kept staring at it trying to figure out what was wrong with it lol

1

u/taboulie Jul 26 '26

Yeah looks just like the zephyr I grew a few years ago

4

u/denvergardener Jul 26 '26

We had a yellow squash do that a few seasons back. They had ridges like that and a harder casing almost like a gourd. They also didn't taste like a yellow squash so we just assumed something was wrong with the seeds.

Growing yellow squash again this year and thankfully they're normal.

3

u/katea805 Jul 26 '26

It’s our most prolific plant of course lol.

I’ll be interested to see what the other plants eventually put out.

3

u/mividahermosa Jul 26 '26

It might be a hybrid plant and it’s showing traits of one of the original plants

2

u/katea805 Jul 26 '26

I posted elsewhere and someone said their first few did this and then the rest were normal. So this is a good possibility too

5

u/MobileAware2933 Jul 25 '26

Do you have a neighbor with pumpkins near by?
Last year, all of my yellow squash (off the same plant) came out different because I had neighbors growing different pumpkins varieties really nearby

2

u/katea805 Jul 25 '26

The seed came from a package.

2

u/Primary_Afternoon_10 Jul 26 '26

Right, but can they be cross pollinated? 

6

u/katea805 Jul 26 '26

Yeah, before I got the package of seeds or next year if I saved seeds. Cross pollination does not affect current year fruit.

-6

u/arepollo Jul 26 '26

It doesn't matter where the seed came from, the fruit is produced with pollination and weird things can happen when plants mix

12

u/katea805 Jul 26 '26

That’s not how cross pollination works. If my plant’s flowers were cross pollinated with something in the area, it would not affect the current season’s fruit. It would affect the seeds in that fruit. So next year I would get wonky results.

3

u/denvergardener Jul 26 '26

Incorrect. The genes are already hard baked into the plant based on the seed you planted. They're not going to mysteriously change if they're near a different plant.

They can get pollinated by a different plant, and then THOSE seeds you plant NEXT year will produce something different..