Bred-by-Johnny's Pumpkin Varieties

Good morning! My name is Nate, and I am the pumpkin trial manager here at Johnny's Selected Seeds.

We're standing here in my pumpkin trial, and today I wanted to talk about four varieties that are new from our breeding program.

Johnny's is a little bit special in that we have an in-house jack-o'-lantern breeding program. My job is to look at those varieties that are the most advanced coming out of that program and compare them to other varieties all over the world.

So here are the four varieties that I wanted to talk with you about today. All four are coming from our breeding program, and were bred by my colleague, Dr. Lindsay Wyatt, before I trialed them in my trialing program.

From my right to left here, we have 'Jack of Hearts', 'The Boss', 'Duchess', and 'Igor'.

'Jack of Hearts'

'Jack of Hearts' is clearly the smallest one here. It's about 6 to 7 pounds on average, and we bred it specifically because we thought we wanted a variety that would work really well for U-pick, particularly something that a kid could pick up and carry to the car easily.

As you can see, it's got a really big, really strong handle. It stays dark for an extended period of time and can handle some pretty serious abuse, which, as you've ever seen a kid running around a U-pick field, is sort of to be expected.

Agronomically, it has slightly shorter vines and very good resistance to powdery mildew, which is something that our breeding program is focused in, particularly with the new varieties.

'The Boss' & 'Duchess'

Here we have 'The Boss', which is this sort of deep orange color, more traditional rib style.

And here on the left, we have 'Duchess', which has this very unique, tight ribbing.

We think that the two varieties complement each other really well, and that you could grow both together or pick the one that best suits your aesthetic.

Both are very uniform, very high yielding. They sort of tick the usual boxes that growers are looking for. They average about 18 to 20 pounds, which puts them in that sort of 30 to 35, 30 to 40 bin class.

Both have, as I said before, excellent resistance to powdery mildew.

Vine wise, 'Duchess' has a little bit of a shorter vine compared to 'The Boss'.

Something sort of to be noted about Duchess is this tight ribbing that you see here, as well as with 'Igor', actually develops as the fruit matures.

If you go out to your pumpkin patch halfway through the season and you see 'Duchess' looking a little bit smooth, don't worry as the fruit matures, those ribs are going to become a lot deeper and more pronounced.

'Igor'

Finally, we have one of my favorite varieties, 'Igor', one of the sort of biggest pumpkins from our lineup and definitely one of the most unique looking. It has this really upright, kind of looming shape that I think works really well for large jack-o'-lanterns and carving.

The wrinkles, the sort of slouching rib and the occasional wart.

It is, as one of my colleagues said, ugly in a good way, which I definitely agree with. Of these four varieties, it probably has the least amount of resistance to powdery mildew, but we get that disease up here every year and we're still able to produce a nice crop of these anyway.

Thank you for watching. We're really proud of these four new varieties from our breeding program. And we hope that you will consider adding them to your home garden or pumpkin patch soon.

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