Welcome to the first episode of Free the Seed! the podcast of the Open Source Seed Initiative.

In this first installment, host Rachel Hultengren interviews Carol Deppe about her work developing Goldini Zucchini.

This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks – who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it.

In this episode we’ll talk with Dr. Carol Deppe about her OSSI-pledged variety ‘Goldini Zucchini’. Oregon plant breeder Carol Deppe holds a PhD in Genetics from Harvard University, and focuses on developing superbly flavorful, organic-adapted, open-source crops for human survival for the next thousand years, and in teaching others to do the same.

Find seeds of 'Goldini Zucchini' through Fertile Valley Seed at www.caroldeppe.com.Dr. Carol Deppe[gdlr_button href="https://osseeds.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/S1E1_GoldiniZucchini_Transcript.pdf" target="_self" size="medium" background="#5dc269" color="#ffffff"]Download the Transcript[/gdlr_button]Free the Seed!Transcript for S1E1: Goldini Zucchini

Rachel Hultengren: Hello and welcome to Free the Seed! This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners, and food-curious folks – who want to dig deeper into the story of where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues, and onto your tables. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren. On this podcast, we’ll hear from plant breeders the stories of how they developed new cultivars that fit the specific needs of farmers and eaters, and why they pledged those varieties to the Open Source Seed Initiative.

In this episode we’ll talk with Dr. Carol Deppe about her OSSI-pledged variety ‘Goldini Zucchini’. Oregon plant breeder Carol Deppe holds a PhD in Genetics from Harvard University, and focuses on developing superbly flavorful, organic-adapted, open-source crops for human survival for the next thousand years, and in teaching others to do the same.

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Rachel Hultengren: Hi Dr. Deppe, welcome to the show, and thanks so much for being with us today!

Carol Deppe: We’ll have fun, I’m sure.

Rachel Hultengren: I’m looking forward to it. So today we’re going to be talking about your OSSI-pledged variety ‘Goldini Zucchini’. And maybe we can start by telling me a bit about the variety – what do you highlight in the catalogue description?

Carol Deppe: Well, this variety is unusual in a lot of ways. For one, I bred it not just as a really delicious summer squash, but it’s also great as a drying squash, and I’ll talk a little more about what I mean by that. But that means that you can produce a long-storing winter staple from your summer squash patch as well as a summer squash. And for reasons completely non-obvious to me, it also turned out to have spectacular flavor raw. That’s really unusual, because when people say that some squash is good raw, I figure that, you know, it’s edible raw. That’s not the same as being good raw.

Basically, the variety got its start when I was reading a book called Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden. And this was about the agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians in the Upper Midwest. And from this book, I learned that the main way that the Indians ate squash - other than just eating it as summer squash - but their main long storing staple was not the mature fruit, it was dried slices of squash that were harvested at the summer squash stage. That was big news to me, but as I thought about it it made a lot of sense, because the Indians didn’t have good storage space or conditions to store a whole lot of dried squash some place.