Best Heirloom Pumpkin Varieties

The many heirloom pumpkin varieties and their origins extend far beyond your favorite pumpkin patch.

By Lawrence Davis-Hollander
Updated on October 9, 2022
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by AdobeStock/Profotokris

The best heirloom pumpkin varieties call you to grow your own pumpkin patch at home — connecting you to deep histories, colors and textures outside the norm.

It’s somewhat difficult to come up with a backyard garden crop more a part of American culture than that plump, round, ribbed, vining fruit that we look forward to honoring every fall. Of course, corn makes the world go ’round — but not sweet corn like you find in the typical backyard garden. Americans also consume about a potato per day on average. And who doesn’t like green beans? Yet all those backyard crops take a backseat each fall as families head into the pumpkin patch, gather around the picnic table to carve jack-o’-lanterns, and in the end enjoy a delicious squash pie at Thanksgiving. Wait … squash?

The simplest maxim is all pumpkin varieties are squash, but not all squash are pumpkins. So what is a pumpkin, and why do we care? Botanists call one particular group of squash, which belongs to one particular species, pumpkins. The species, Cucurbita pepo, differs from all other species of squash in certain characteristics, such as its leaves and stem. The classic orange fruit, whether big or small, round or oblong, is what botanists routinely agree is a pumpkin. Not everyone else, though, is on the same page. Let’s try and get to the bottom of it, shall we?

Pepo squashes include pattypan, zucchini (var. fastigata), and yellow summer squash, the winter varieties of acorn (var. turbinate), pumpkin (var. pepo) and spaghetti squash, and others. One difference between summer and winter squashes is that we eat summer squash before seeds have hardened and the fruit has ripened, while we eat winter squash only after the fruit has matured.

Domesticated Squash

Let’s wind back thousands of years. Some 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, clever Native Americans domesticated pepo squash from wild gourds in Mexico. What these squash were really like is unclear, but they may have been cultivated only for their seeds at first and, in some cases, for their hard shells. What we do know is that these first domesticated fruits contained the distinctive orange pigmentation of true pumpkins.

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