Pumpkin stowaway

[Benny_BE]

Hello all,
I've got a horse pumpkin with no name.

Fruit: yellow, some are partial dark green when young but the green spot reduces with age. Ball/egg shaped
Leaves: that's the weirdest part! The leaves are shaped and coloured like those of a zucchini.
Vines: thick dark green, like zucchini.
Taste: sweet pumpkin taste, nothing like zucchini.

I'll post the pictures in the follow-up message. (I've to upload them)

[Benny_BE]

I call it a stowaway because we didn't buy any variety like this.

On trellis with reduced green:


On the ground with its "zucchini leaves"


Third fruit cut for examination (notice the greenish area)


Inside, it looks like a pumpkin and tastes like a pumpkin.


It wasn't completely ripe yet but the taste was very nice. The weight was 2.5 kg which is about 5 pounds.

[digitS']

Sounds Good. This wasn't a volunteer in your garden? Cucurbita pepo includes both pumpkins and summer squash, as well as gourds and acorn squash. With very open flowers and frequented by bees, cross-pollination occurs. Looking at an online chart from a university in Texas, I see the recommendation to isolate varieties for seed saving by 1/2 mile.

At the distant garden, the neighbor and I both make use of the same tractor guy to till the garden once each year. We have both grown summer squash and pumpkins and have had gourds, at times. I've had two surprises with C. pepo volunteers. One was a mess of plants including those that started growing in my current year's squash patch. I left one or two and the result was gourd-like fruit.

I left a volunteer plant one year that looked like a pumpkin vine. One large fruit developed. It had a pumpkin shape but stayed dark green right into Autumn.

Yours may be worth growing again and you may see if the characteristics you appreciate will be stable.

Steve

[benali]

Very cool!

Thanks for posting these pics.

I ordered a variety pack of unnamed pumpkin seeds that I assume came from China a few years ago. It yielded several varieties of winter and summer squash, pumpkins, etc., and I never knew the names of any of them. It was lots of fun to see what came up and test them out (for eating).

[Benny_BE]

I'm suspecting that the stowaway came with the package of "Blue Kuri". Another plant, which is for sure a "Blue Kuri" (at least from that package), starts as a dark green pumpkin shape but grows to a ball shape. The green rips apart in narrow short splints (up to down) uncovering a yellow surface.
I guess they either mixed in some alternative types of Hokkaido or the Blue Kuri tends to fall back to ancestral looks.