Hello! I have some "Big Italian" Tomato seeds that I saved this year from my open pollinated plants. I'm wanting to try my hand at another type of c. moschata besides my stand-by butternut squash (which I also have seeds for). First time trader here.

Thanks, George, for the reminder. I have started a new Note on my Yahoo Notepad which might be useful for all of you: It's called Forum Posts. I record each post I send in and those that I am interested in following over a long period. I do this BEFORE I send them, in case I forget to go to that final step in postings, as you say. Also, a lot of times I don't feel like reconstructing the whole post if it doesn't make it through. GardenWeb is good in that you can click off the little box to have future postings sent to you [IF you started the post...another little box would be useful, if you want to get all the future reply to post you didn't start but are interested in AND that come in weeks later, after the post is way down the list and for all purposes 'forgotten' about.] Other forums I use: don't even have the first little box [Cloudforest and Dave's Garden]. These I have in a folder called Garden Forums in my Favorites Drop-down menu. As you get older you need all the help you can get... BTW I'll send a copy of this to GardenWeb's administrators, God willing ;^P d

No reason that I know of, that you could not cross a cheese pumpkin with a butternut. Some of the tear drop shaped C. moschatas may have come about that way. Here is a link that might be useful: squash

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