 Hello, you all. My name is André. Oh, show up again. And, okay, my name is André de Silva. I'm the extension vegetable specialist. And last week, we talked about tomatoes, some variety selection, some crop management, some tomato disorders. But this week, we are switching gears and we are talking a little bit more about the cucurbit crops and how to manage it or how to select the varieties. Actually, I'm more focused on the variety selection today, because cucurbits, they are a vast different, different crops like yellow squash, zucchini, melons, water melons, or even special pumps, they are all cucurbits. And I want to focus more on variety selections for them than the management itself in your fields. So, if you still have some questions after the after the talk, like feel free to contact me or contact your ANR, your, your agent, and we can like, we can come and try to solve your problems regarding preparing, preparing your fertilization or your planting space. We have got some questions about that. So you're more than welcome to talk with us. So you will see that today is pretty much straightforward. And the crop that I'm going to start talking about is zucchini cucurits. So in one of our variety trials that we conducted for zucchini, we tested 11 different varieties. The varieties are all listed. And in here, they come with the SV609, the SV0914, stem payload, respect, justice tree, SV0474, the paycheck, spineless beauty, perfection, and spineless skin. And let's go straight for our results regarding our yield, because I want to give you guys the best option available. For commercial growers, I would say, okay, so first let's explain what's going on in this graph. So here we have yield in box per acre and the varieties. Varieties on green listed here are our top in that particular year. Yellows are our varieties in the middle way, and the red one did not perform it as good as we were expecting. However, spineless beauty, spineless perfection, and spineless skin is some of the varieties that for pickers. So if you have to pick your own zucchini, you are more a home garden or you are in a beginner farm, that might be a good variety because although they yield a little bit lower, they're going to provide you an easier way to pick. So you're going to increase the marketability of your fruits because they don't have the spines that a zucchini culture usually has. So those are your top varieties. Those are a good varieties for beginners. But if you are in a commercial production scale, the 609, 0915, 10 payload and respect were your top varieties and that's what we would go with. Remember, when you are picking your fruits, you should separate them in fence or medium. So fence are considered smaller fruits that are going to go up to six inches. Everything above six inches is considered a medium, so you can get a higher price for fence. So frequently picking off your fruits would be ideal for you to increase your profit. Remember, mediums can still be sold. However, they're going to get a lower price per box. The fence and proportion of fence and medium from your total fruit fence are represented in each bar in green while mediums are represented in yellow. And we conducted our picks every other day during the week for an entire month. So we did about 12 to 15 picks and that's when you start to see a reduction in your yield. But still, if you are a grower, you want to get the max from your plant. So you can do even like two 20 picks that would be completely fine. So for the years varieties, I would keep rest pack payload, the stem in a large commercial production scale. But if you are in a home garden, spineless beauty and spineless perfection would be a good option for you. Moving on, when we switch for yellow squash, just remember zucchini and yellow squash, the production system is basically the same. The only thing is they're changed a little bit is their color and their flavor. But sometimes zucchinis tend to be a tougher plant than yellow squash. So you're going to see more disease, more less vigor on yellow squash plants when compared to zucchini. However, we still investigate some varieties, nine different varieties now, like Gentry, Conker Tree, Cosmo, Laser, Gold Price. And similar to the previous slide where we have the graphs for yield for Kuchivar, I did the same for yellow squash. So the Kuchivar, Gentry and Conker provide the best options for our spring season. So if you are a growing who are planting right now in the spring, I would go with Gentry and Conker. However, it's important to highlight here that Gentry and Conker, they are two varieties that don't have a good disease package. So if you are in an area where you have white flies that can transmit virus or you have Downy Mule or the Mosaic virus, those would be a problem and you're going to need a frequent spring. On the other hand, Gold Price and Grand Price are Kuchivars with a good package of disease resistance. So I would go for those two varieties if you are in a region in an area with a lot of disease pressure. But regarding yields in our trials, what we saw is that Gentry and Conker Tree were our top variety. It was followed by Cosmo, Laser, Gold Price and Enterprise. Goldy Stars and Lioness performed pretty good. Actually, for South Alabama, I would recommend Lioness. It's a very good variety much in yield, which was already expected because usually when you have a Kuchivar with a good package for disease resistance, it will not yield much. That's what we have seen on different crops. But I don't want that to impact your variety selection because sometimes, like I said before, you are in an area with a high disease pressure and you might need a Kuchivar that yields a little bit less, but will provide you a good resistance to disease. So this can avoid you for an outbreak. One of the particular disorders that are disease and insects that you might have, I know that Dr. A will be talking about these insects a little bit later. So I'm just going to go through it very quick. On yellow squash is the coniferar rot. Usually when you are planting your squash, you might see those rotting in the blossom end of your yellow squash, but also zucchini. And this is a fungus that is attacking your flower. And this is going to happen when you have warmer and wet temperatures or warmer temperatures and wet conditions. So it's very common. It's hard to control. I don't know much of fungicides that can be used. So we have seen fields being well-infected by conifer. Another problem caused by high temperatures are the baseball bat shape that you might see in your fruit. When you have a thinner and in your stem part of your fruit with like a regular size or on the blossom end, this is caused by temperature. When you have high temperature, your plants are stressed and they will cause and this will cause the disorders, this disorder here. Pigeon and phytophora are common problem as well for yellow squash and zucchini. It usually goes when you have high temperature and wet conditions. So it's similar to coniferar and the bacteria will enter through the root system of your plant and will affect your fruit. So if you see this in the field, you do have a problem with pigeon or phytophora. Squash bugs. Dr. A will talk a little bit more about that, but are usually a concern early in the season. So if you use, if you transplant or you're a squash or you directly seed, you must to keep scouting for a squash bug because they can like destroy or upgrade your fields. But I will let Dr. A talk a little bit more about that. And finally, the oedema, it's a problem that causes it by that when you over irrigate your crops or when you have a rainfall event, you have a lot of water availability and the blood is up, take more water than it can. Consequently, it will cause the wrapped growth of the cells in the fruit and they will break. When they break, they will cause this stain in your fruit. It doesn't say that it's a disease. It doesn't say that your fruit cannot be eaten. However, it says it's hard for a marketable. You can use for your own consumption, but I would not recommend you for a marketable because if you are in a wholesale part, you will not be packing those kind of fruits. So with yellow squash and zucchini disorders, with yellow squash and zucchini overall, that's what I would like to show. However, and now I would like to move gears a little bit about handiw, which is a crop, not much attention in the state. However, we do can grow here. There are three particular main varieties that I would recommend to use here. And although I have evaluated a bunch of other varieties in the past, I will not run away from those three varieties, which is the HD 252, the HD 150, and the OC 164. They can provide a good yields, but more particularly, they can provide a higher bricks. And that's what you're looking. In one of my trials, the HD 252 was consistently over two years the best variety, while the HD 150 and OC 152. However, if you have to choose between the 150 and the 164, I would stay with the 150 because they have a higher bricks than the other ones, similar to the other ones, like total yield by the varieties. Also, I would like to present to you guys some Kenloge cultivars that we have available. I selected the top five that I have done in the past. Those varieties are Athena, Aphrodite, Infinite Goat, DaVinci, and the F39. Athena and Aphrodite are two very common varieties. You can find seeds for them in basically any seed store or like Johnny seeds or seedway. Those things, they sell those varieties. And by far, they perform the best. Infinite Goat is also a good variety. This is an average for one of our year of trials that we did where Athena, Aphrodite, and the Infinite Goat perform the best while DaVinci and F39 did not perform that good. However, I would like to emphasize one thing. If you are a whole sales, you are looking for a higher yield. So those three varieties would be good. If you are selling in a farmer's market or you are more, it's a very good variety and consistent high quality internally with the highest brits over the two years that we conduct this trial. So this is a very good variety. If you are doing like a home garden or if you are a beginner farm, DaVinci is very good. I just need to say that DaVinci don't have a very good disease package. So you might face some of disease problems here and there. But these are like, this is a variety for the beginners while commercial growers would stay with Athena, Aphrodite, and Infinite Goat. So switch cures once again for watermelon, watermelon. We have a lot of home gardens, but also beginner farmers want to play with watermelon. Commercial growers love it. And watermelon is a particular crop that we are giving a lot of emphasis. So we're evaluating every year about 30 varieties. This year, we're going to have one of our variety trials with David in Clinton. So if you guys would like to stop by and see what we are testing there, you're more than welcome. So one particular thing that I need to say is in our watermelon variety trials, we do seedless watermelon and they need pollinizer. SP7 pollinizers that we have nowadays, and I strongly recommend with you guys to use that. Sakata also has a variety, a pollinizer variety called wild card. It's very common to see however wild card has a very quick development after planting. So you want to delay the planting of your pollinizer if you are using wild card a week when compared to your regular variety, your female variety, because you wanted them to be the same size when you're transplant plants to the field. Watermelon, I like to separate them and show you guys by size of fruits. We have 60 counts, 45 counts, 36 counts and 30 counts. This is how whole sales will sell it, where 30 counts are your biggest melons, 21 pounds or more. 36 pounds go from 17 pounds to 21 pounds, 45, 13 pounds to 17, and six counts are the smallest melons from 9 to 30 pounds. So like I always show in my variety trial for selection, I pull out a graph with the total yield by variety, and in our variety trial we got all these varieties in greens with similar yield. I would say that talca, blackjack, red umber, all the new syngenta varieties with WDL 64, 24, 64, 29 and 64, 21, the 7187, joy reed, cracker, cracker jack, guardsman and charismatic and the 7197 were our top variety for whole sales markets. For beginners' farm and for for home gardens, I would strongly recommend blackjack. Blackjack, it's a new variety, it was released two years ago and for those growers who used to go sangria, which is an old variety, blackjack is just an evolution of sangria. It's just a better variety. So if you are used to sangria, which every year we have seen a lack of seeds available, blackjack is an option, so and it has a very high bricks content. Like I said before, some of the varieties that have been topped in my variety trials over five years that we have conducted this trial would be like talca, blackjack, red umber, joy reed, charrismat, fascination and captivation. They have been always having top yields regardless of year, so I strongly recommend if group here, they are very good one. While turnpike and trebledore, they are they are heros moron varieties and they produce very large fruits. So if you are looking for a variety with large fruits, I would say with trebledore or turnpike. Just for you to have an idea, I separate the total yield by size 60 counts, 45 counts, 36 counts and 30 counts. So as you see, blackjack produce like bigger fruits, was the variety that produced the biggest fruits, talca produced the largest 36, red umber, the largest 45 counts and talca, the largest 60 counts. Still, if you are a grower for holy sales, you don't want big fruits, neither like you don't want a 60 counts, neither 30 counts. You want to stay on the 45 and 35 counts. So varieties that achieve it, 7% of their yield as 45 and 35 counts were the 7197, charrismatic, the 7408, embassy, the 7401, turnpike, 8415, red opal, 7406, joy read, 6421 and secretariat. So if you are in a large-scale commercial production, which we have 75% or more of 45 or 35 counts, if you are a smaller grower targeting larger fruits, I would go with blackjack or trebledore. So that's something that you must keep in mind. But most important other than the size of the watermelon is the brick's content. If you are selling your watermelon or even if you are eating your watermelon, you want to get the swistest melon as possible. And bricks is what it's represent, is the solubile, solidest of your fruit, which is the sugar concentration in the fruit. And commercially, you don't want to have, you cannot, like in a commercial scale, you will not be able to sell your fruit if the bricks is smaller than 12%. So you want a variety that can yield more than 12%. Above 10% is already a very sweet fruit, but you don't, you want to go higher than 12%. That's the ideal fruit. And in this black, in this red line here represent our 12% bar and the fruit and varieties circled by red are the one who achieved that 12%. So like I said, blackjack, the 6375, 6429, jewelry, crackerjack, 7196, Luzio, embassy, fascination, the 7401 and the 7408 were varieties who achieved that bricks that we are looking for. So keep that in mind, you are not looking only for the highest yield, you're not looking only for the better number of fruit, but you are also looking in watermelon, the bricks of your fruit. I put here also some problems that you can have, although I call disorder, I also like to include some insects or disease. And one of a common problem that you guys can find in our area here in Alabama is fruit blotch, which is the sun exposure. When your fruit is exposed to the sun, it can have, it can have this stain in the fruit, and that's going to turn them unmarked. So make sure that you have a good coverage of your canopy. So this way the fruit exposure is minimal. Another common disorder is hollow heart. Hollow heart is the crack inside your fruit. As you can see here, I put different levels of hollow heart. Hollow heart is usually caused by a bad pollination. When you have the flowers open and high heat stress or dry stress that is common in Alabama, pollination is poor. Consequently, you're going to have that impact that it's causing hollow heart. But hollow heart is a combination of a bad pollination with lack of the season. And you think that if you cut your irrigation to make your fruit sweeter, you are actually not doing good for your fruit. The fruit will not get sweeter because you are cutting water. It will get sweeter because it's up taking more nutrients. And when it's up taking more nutrients, you need to have available water available. And if you don't have water available, you will not have that sweet. Plus you're going to induce the cracker because the cells of your fruit internally will think that they can grow, but they don't have water and neither nutrients to grow. They will wrap it and cause the hollow heart of your melon. So keep that in mind. Selecting a good planting date when your flowering is not under higher temperatures and provide good water available to the plants in the end of the season during fruit maturity, it's going to minimize hollow heart of your fruits. Two diseases that are very common and housing problem for us is gummi stem blight that you can see is like look like a gem or an eye brownish in the middle of your leaf and it extended to the to the edge of the leaves. This is gum gummi stem blight. And that's a problem. So check it every year and try to rotate some crops and fusarium will. Fusarium is a very common. It's look like your disease and your looks like your plant is wilting and dying. And you might think that is lack of water, but actually it's not. Actually this is actually this don't have any variety resistant to fusarium right now. And if you have in your field that's a big problem and hard to control because we have seen fields over 10 years with like without watermelon and fusarium is still been a problem in that field. So keep that in mind if you have a fusarium a crop rotation to minimize the damage is very important. I will switch gears from watermelon to special pumpkins. I know that it's a lot of information, but I would like to give as much as possible variety so you can have a successful crop this year. So in one of our trials last year we evaluated Cabocha special pumpkins but also other special special pumps that I will talk later. And those are some pictures of the varieties we tested last year. Umber max, chatea, geisha, delica, golden Buddha bow, the shox chain, green, sunshine, speckle pop, winter sweet and sweet mom. And what I want to go here is over the total yield number of fruit and fruit weight for those ones because sometimes a grower are looking for highest yield other they are looking for higher number of fruit other they are looking for fruit weight. And this is because sometimes we have a lot of pumping patches in the state and that's a good information for pumping impacts. So total yield among our variety was the highest for but it was not different from geisha, delica, and the speckle pop and sweet mama. So if you are looking for higher yields in pounds per acre those are the varieties that I would be suggesting you guys to plant. Golden Buddha bow, sweet mama, all the way to sweet mama. However if you are a grower looking for more number of fruits which is our second graphic here you can see that shox chain green was our best option and achieving the highest the highest number of fruit. They are smaller fruits though so if you are looking for fruit weight they will not be an option for you. When you're looking for fruit weight the variety geisha was our our topest variety on the average weight of the fruit. So that's where you want to stay between golden Buddha bow, geisha for total yield, shing shing, shox chain green for the number of fruits and the variety geisha for the highest number of the highest average fruit weight. So those are information for those pumpkin patch growers that would like to attract more visitor for their farm and in the similar pattern I put some other special pumpkins like the flat white boar, the mariana dichoga, speckle horn, porcelain dough, and mine price. We did this trial this particular trial we did in the south also produce special pumpkins because our mindset is that most of our special pumps are produced in the north portion of the state where they had cooler temperatures but if you decide the optimum planting date for your special pumps you can also do that in the southern portion of the state. So just for you guys to have an idea our yields were as high as for as in the north that I just showed before and our total yields reached almost 25,000 pounds per acre which mine price was and porcelain dough was our best varieties for total yield. Similar to the to the Cabocha trial if you are planting if you are looking for a largest number of fruit the speckled horn was our variety who produced the largest number of fruit while the mariana dichoga was our variety that produced the lowest number of fruit. Total yield was a little bit reflected from the average fruit weight so porcelain dough and mine price was our variety for the average number of weight but I would like to emphasize here if you have a variety want to diversify so this way you can attract all the clients this way if you have a problem with a disease one of particular variety might be resistant to that disease and the other not so while others not so keep that in mind that that can be an option for you guys and the one of the things that I always keep emphasize during my coach for talks is about the impact of temperature of weather conditions moisture and temperature on your plants so this way I like to show you I put here a table showing when are the best planting dates during the spring and fall season for north portion of the state and the south portion of the state for all the varieties that are all the crop that we talk about today so let's say that in the north you are in north alabama in the spring and you want to plant yellow squash and zucchini you want to put them in the field all the way from april to early september late and early september your pollination it will be too cold and we will not be able to plant if you are planted in the north alabama during the fall you don't want to plant much more than august so I would say if you're going to go all the way to august 30 you are good but you don't want to plant later than that if you are in the south portion of the state you can plant march and april and during the spring and july and september during the fall this is for yellow squash melons they can be planted in april and may but I would although we do can plant melons in august I would avoid it because there is a high risk of disease in the early season and you can lost south alabama march and may for the for melons and same thing for the fall I would avoid it water melons just one season I would not recommend water melons during the fall and you need to know your car your market for water melons usually if you are producing in a large data scale or you want to sell in the farmer markets people looking for water melons during the fourth of july or the memorial day so planting between april and may in north alabama in march and april in the south alabama it's ideal keep in mind different varieties have different uh have different uh harvest in dates usually for watermelon you are looking for something between 80 to 100 days so just play with your planting day there special pumpkins in the spring we don't recommend it much but we do recommend planting the fall north alabama july and august and south alabama august as september this way you can target the halloween so if you are planting even your regular pumpkins those are the dates that you are looking for to plant um I don't want to go more in depth with planting dates because it's specific for each location I just would like you guys to keep in mind that looking for a certain um certain time of planting where your temperature and your weather conditions will not affect your crop and selecting the up variety for your location or for your management conditions is the first step for you to ensure that you're going to achieve uh you're going to be successful and achieve the potential you your area can do so with that I would like to thank you guys I don't want to get that longer but if you guys have any questions please I'm here to answer