Waltham Butternut

Waltham Butternut is the reference butternut, the variety every other butternut is measured against, and it came out of public breeding at the Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station in Waltham where Robert 'Bob' Young spent years selecting it before release. Fedco records the cross as New Hampshire Butternut — a 1956 Yaeger and Meader development — with a neckless moschata from Turkey; All-America Selections credits the University of Massachusetts and gave the variety its 1970 AAS award. What Young fixed was uniformity: straight, thick necks in place of the crooknecks and misshapen fruit that plagued earlier butternuts, plus a harder rind that stores through winter. More than half a century on it is still the most widely grown full-size open-pollinated butternut, and it is the Waltham half of newer breeding work such as Edmund Frost's South Anna. Being open-pollinated, it is one of the few commercially dominant squashes a grower can legitimately save seed from.