Breeding Success

Blonde Beauty. Sugar Cube. First Kiss. Smooth Operator.

No, these aren’t pop song titles or lipstick shades: They’re seed names of squashes, pumpkins and melons — vining plants collectively known as cucurbits. They’re also among the 80-plus varieties of cucurbits bred by UNH during the past 60 years.

Those six decades make UNH’s cucurbit breeding program the nation’s longest running. The seeds to those tasty veggies, licensed to gardener-favorite companies like Johnny’s Selected Seeds or High Mowing Organic Seeds, have earned UNH $1.6 million in royalties since 2015.

“If you look through a seed catalog today at the squash or pumpkins or melons, the majority of those varieties have been touched by the UNH program in some way,” says Chris Hernandez, assistant professor of agriculture, nutrition and food systems.

Hernandez oversees the cucurbit breeding program at UNH’s Kingman Farm, building on the half-century legacy of Brent Loy, a giant in the plant breeding world, and beloved professor of plant biology from 1967 until his passing in 2020.

UNHInnovation, which manages the university’s technology transfer and worked in close collaboration with Loy and now Hernandez, recently launched a line with High Mowing Organic Seeds called Loy’s Choice^TM.

Hernandez is focusing his efforts on new varieties that will tolerate and resist new threats — diseases and insects — driven by a warming climate. He’s working with UNH’s Hubbard Center for Genome Studies, founded with a $3 million gift from 1921 alumnus and benefactor Oliver Hubbard. Through the center, Hernandez will collect genetic data via DNA sequencing that will aid in preserving and cataloging UNH’s vast collection of cucurbit seeds — work hardly imaginable at the dawn of UNH’s cucurbit breeding program in the 1940s.

“You get to be a plant inventor,” says Hernandez.

“You’re creating new varieties of plants that have never been seen before.”