The old Burgess Buutercup is usually a fair performer, good vine with decent yield. Very susceptible to SVB tho. Lots of vendors just sell a generic buttercup now. Unless the grower has been careful and selective, The burgess can lose a lot of it qualities. The Japanese Kabocha s are in the same group, so you might want to try one of those. Here is a link that might be useful: buttercup

George, I bet you're right, but I hate going out on a limb like that. Merton, I thought maybe I could find a comparison of the cucurbita seeds that would help you, so I checked my copy of Suzanne Ashworth's book SEED TO SEED: SEED SAVING AND GROWING TECHNIQUES FOR VEGETABLE GARDENERS and here is how she describes them: Cucurbita maxima: Thick seeds that are white or tan or brown with cream colored margins and thin cellophane coatings. (As George pointed out, your Lakota is a maxima so should fit this description.) C. moschata seeds are small, oblong and beige with a dark beige margin. (Your butternut is a moschata so one of your two solid tan types of seed ought to match this description.) C. pepo seeds are cream-colored and each has a white margin. Your acorn squash is a pepo so its seed should match this description. The problem is that your spaghetti squash is a pepo also, so its' seeds ought to match this description too. C. agyrosperma (formerly mixta) seeds would be the easiest to identify because they usually have small cracks in them. (They are described as white or tan with a pale margin and cracks in the skin coat on the flat sides of the skins which are covered with a thin cellophane covering.) None of the squash in your packet are agyrosperma types though. If you have specific variety names for your spaghetti, butternut, acorn and Lakota squashes, you probably could google and find descriptions of each squash, including the approximate size of the mature squash and that size might help you figure out which of your pepo seeds is which. Or, you might e-mail the seed company and see if they can tell you, by description only, which seed is which variety. Dawn

Diane, Yes, you do! LOL One year, a friend of ours decided to plant his first garden. He'd been to our house for years and his then 5 or 6-year-old son was just fascinated with the garden and most especially with the small Blacktail Mountain watermelons. (We always helped him search for a ripe one he could pick "by himself" and take home to eat.) So, they planted a garden (and never said they were planting one until it was mostly done) and I gave them 4 "leftover" tomato plants, which is all he had room for. As it turned out, he'd made a lot of rookie mistakes like not properly improving the caliche soil and he planted the tomatoes and a lot of cool season crops very late. He never got a ripe tomato, but he'd planted a whole row of zukes and a whole row of yellow crookneck squash and every single one of those plants produced like crazy. He kept bringing over more and more and more zucchini and squash....I think it was his way of saying "thank you" for the years and years of tomatoes, watermelon and guinea eggs we'd given them. Keep in mind we already had our own plants that produced far more than we'd ever eat and preserve in a year's time, and then we had all the ones he brought us a couple of times a week. By the end of that growing season, I could hardly stand to look at a zuke or squash. And do keep in mind, dear friend, that you have a few more mouths to feed than some of us do : ) I enjoy squash, but I don't "love" it the way I do tomatoes. I could eat tomatoes 5 times a day. With squash, two or three times a week is plenty for me. How's the garden and how are the chicks? Our little roosters are learning to crow, which is hysterically funny (and, at the same time, painful) to listen to. Dawn

With the price of food being what it is I thought it might be a good time to bump this in hopes of giving fellow "green horns" some encouragement. If you have little money, little knowledge and crappy soil you can still do this! Last May I was totally green behind the ears when it came to gardening. This year I can say I am not TOTALLY green any more. Lets just say I am different shade of green. LOL. Last year I started with little money or experience, but a real need to learn as fast as I could to help get food on the table. So if this sounds like you then let me tell you that it isn't easy, but if you work hard, and with Mother Natures help, you can put food on the table for your family too. Also if you just found gardenweb like I did last May stick around. You will find the people here really nice and the information invaluable. This is how far we have come in a little more than a year. We had precious little decent soil to work with. What we had for soil I had tested and am still working on amending it to meet the requirements, but in the mean time those sections, are or were, planted with: pole beans, peas and snow peas, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, carrots, herbs, asparagus, bush beans, summer squash and zucchini, red beets, spinach, swiss chard, parsnips, onions and green onions, acorn squash, cucumbers, egg plant, broccoli, cauliflower, red and green cabbage, garlic, white and purple kolrabi, pumpkin, 6 blue berry bushes, 3 grapevines and rhubarb. To replace some of the vegetables already harvested, are or will be: broccoli, kale, collards, bush beans, golden beets, carrots, green onion, kolrabi and next years garlic. How I did it with out much money to work with is that I sold some things for seed money. We built what raised beds we have with small scraps of salvaged wood pieced together to "make" a length of board and made boxes of all sizes. Then filled them with hand sifted soil, scrounged from where ever and brought a bucket or a wheel barrow at a time to fill them and then ammended. We now have one large lasagna bed which was behind a retaining wall that was filled with rocky fill. Some of the fill was hand dug out and used elsewhere. Some really heavy blue clay, that hardens almost as hard as a rock, was scrounged to replace it. Then that was covered with lasagna layers. The winter squash and some zucchini are growing like crazy there! We have 2 more lasagna beds, that have no sides, that the cauliflower, cabbage and broccoli loved. Most of those vegetables are in the freezer now. We just starting a new larger lasagna bed off the side yard which we hope to plant next year. What would have been the front lawn had the only decent soil. Much of that was sifted by hand to remove LITERALLY pickup truck loads of rocks. That one is planted mostly with Dick Raymond's wide rows and with pole beans. We did peas in wide rows and will definitely do that again! Same for the bush beans, carrots, beets, swiss chard, etc. More yield per square foot! The side yard was rocky fill. A long trench was hand dug and replaced with more hand sifted and amended soil for the asparagus and more of the same to plant the blueberries and grapes. We have had problems with 1st, torrential rains, that was followed by high heat and humidity with no rain. Then if only we could eat the beetles! But with diligence, determination and perhaps "luck" the vegetables are growing and producing. It does help if you are a stubborn as a mule. The most important thing in growing food under these conditions is what decolady01/Becky and Gumby_CT said: Just keep on planting and never give up.