Growing your own pumpkins is in truth good fun. Watching the vines grow, flowers blossom and tiny little pumpkins form is genuinely exciting. They require amidst 6 to 8 hours of sun light a day, rich soil bettered with compost and lots of space or something to climb on. They are exceedingly easy to grow and may erupted out of your compost, without any support from you. The variety, well who knows, it depends on what you purchased at the supermarket and what seeds went into the compost heap. They do have galore querky traits and it may be very frustating when the vine is exceedingly healthful and you only get male flowers. It may likewise be exceedingly devasting if you think you are going to get a pumpkin to find it has dropped off. Why you ask yourself, what happened, what do I do wrong? My answer is – in all likelihood nothing. Pumpkins are notorious for not constructing fruit.

Pumpkins belong to the genus Cucurbita and the family Cucurbitaceae which includes zucchini, water melon, rock melon, squash, cucumbers and gourds. The word pumpkin origninates from the word “pepon” which is Greek for “large melon” It is classified as a vine and need a large total of room to grow. Pumpkins are monoecious which means having both male and female flowers on the same plant, so you only need one plant to invent fruit.

Preparing the soil

Pumpkins like a soil pH bwtween 6 to 7.2. If your soil is on the acidic side then I suggest you add a great deal of gardeners lime and if it is on the high side – alkaline – then you may lower it by applying sulphur. To prepare the soil for pumpkins, I suggest you comprise a large total of compost and cow or sheep manure. A good handful of blood and bone plus potash will be beneficial. Pumpkins are an annual crop and need a rich organic soil, so that they may grow quickly and formulate fruit before the winter cold sets in. The soil also needs to drain well and if your soil is clay, then I suggest you make a mound using a good quality loam. This will raise their origins up above the clay and bad drainage.

Siting your Pumpkin

Pumpkins need a lot of room and may smoother other plants if left unchecked. Now if you have a little garden and don’t wish to be invaded by the trifid plants then I suggest growing them up next to a fence or shed or putting in a great deal of lattice and training the tendrils up that. The good point regarding tying them up is that it gets the fruit off the ground away from pests such as slugs and snails and sicknesses such as mildew. If space isn’t a problem, then just let them wander. You will find you have a drifting sea of huge pumpkin leaves enveloping your garden. If they get into any mischief, just prune them back, it won’t injure them!

Propagating Pumpkins

The best time to plant pumpkin seeds is in spring, when the soil and air temperature is warming up. If starting them off in the vegetable patch, the soil temperature needs to be at least 20C for germination and the air temperature 22C. You may begin them off in pots in a hot house if you like, but the garden soil still needs to be over 20C when you plant them out. They don’t like the cold or frost.

When you plant the seed directly into the garden, make a mound with regards to 1/2 metre wide and plant 3-4 seeds regarding 4-5cm deep. Depending on the warmth of the soil they will have to sprout within when it comes to 7-10 days. When the baby seedlings have amid 4-6 leaves, pinch out the weakest plants, leaving the firmest ones. If you don’t pinch out the weak ones, the mound will be over crowded and none of the pumpkins will thrive. If you don’t want to disregard them, replant them someplace else in the veggie patch.

Favourable conditions

Pumpkins are grown in summer, need amongst 70-120 days before they are ready to harvest and that is normally in early to mid autumn. Pumpkins like don’t like scorching temperatures and will shut down and stop growing. They are shoal rooted, wilt without apparent effort and that is why it is important to prepare the soil with a large total ofcompost and animal manure to help increase the water keeping capacity of the soil. If the soil retains it is water, then it is available to the plant to replace the moisture it is losing through it is leaves. Pumpkins do not like being water stressed and don’t like the flood and famine watering regime. It may cause them to split. They like nice even watering and the best time is in the morning. If you water at night and the leaves become wet, powdery mildew may set in. Pumpkins don’t like wind and need to be protected from it. Heat and strong winds may cause woodiness which makes the pumpkin very unpleasing to eat. It is also thought that too much wind may cause scarring on the flesh.

The vine takes when it comes to 10 weeks before it starts manufacturing flowers and the males are first. They are on long thin stems (called pedicels) and there are heaps more of them than females. If you peak inside the male flower you will find a long thin strucutre called the stamen which formulates the pollen. The female flowers have a shorter pedicel and sit closer to the vine. If you peak inside the female flower you will see the stigma which is where the pollen is received. The ovary is at the base of the petals and is where the seeds develop.

Fertilising the Ovary

The flowers only open for 1 day; just before dawn, the flower petals begin to unfurl and open for a 4 hour period. By mid-day they are beginning to tardily close and by dusk they have shut permanently. Pumpkins are pollinated by insects, exceptionally native and honey bees, so it is crucial to give hope or courage to them into your garden. It is mutual for the female flowers ovary to great and commence to look like a pumpkin is forming. But disaster, it turns brown and drops off. This occurs because it hasn’t been fertilised due to lack of bees. There are various things you may do to give hope or courage to them:

• Don’t use systemic (poisons that are absorbed into the plant and may last for assorted weeks) sprays, as numerous of them kill the bees when they eat the nectare of the flowers
• Plant French lavender Lavanduala denatate, it flowers closely all year.
• Plant a large total of Iceland Poppies – honey bees adore them
• Provide water for the bees, they will tell their friends and more bees will visit.

Now, if the weather has been beastly either too hot or too cold and you detect there are not a lot of bees buzzying around, you may try fertilising them yourself. There are 2 methods, hand pollinating using the male flower or using a tooth brush. To hand pollinate, pick male flowers, remove petals then dab the pollen on the stigma of female flowers. I tried the tooth bush method once, where you gently bush the toothbush over the stamen, then gently bush it over the stigma but it didn’t work. I suggest you undertake the primary method.

To save seed from harvested pumpkins, store it for a month, then scope out the flesh, wash it away and arid the seeds on paper towel. Then store them in a clean arid glass jar in a cool arid spot away from sunlight. It is also a good idea to label the bottle with the assortment of pumpkin and date. I guarantee if you don’t you will have forgotten in a years time, what potpourri it is.

Pumpkins are notorius for cross pollinating with one another so to see to it unfeigned to type, save seed from one assortment grown in isolation. You may need to hand pollinate it, to ascertain there is no contamination of pollen.

Why isn’t my Pumpkin formulating Fruit?

I noted earlier that pumkpins are notorius for not constructing fruit and there are some reasons why.

• Pumpkins are weather and temperature sensitive. If it is too hot, too cold, too windy, too rainy then you may not get fruit. I suggest you undertake hand pollination exceptionally if the temperatures are over 30C. Remember, if the weather is eradicatic and temperatures fluxuate widely; then a heap of plants shut down, until conditions become more suitable.
• It is thought that seed younger than 3 years old, formulates more male flowers than female flowers.
• Lack of insects in your garden. Bees, ants and other insects are critical in the transfer of pollen process. If they aren’t present, then the pollen won’t be transposed to the female flower – therefore no pumpkins
• Heavy rain may harm the pollen, which means that even if it is transposed by insects, it won’t fertilise the flower and therefore again no fruit.
• One trick to try to give hope or courage to more female flowers, is to nip off the apical (also known as terminal) bud (top point of growth) and give hope or courage to lateral (side) growth.
• Make sure when you prepare the bed that you incorporate a lot of potash (encourages flowers)in and not put too much nitrogen in eg. blood and bone, which causes excess leaf growth.

Pests and Diseases

There are the normal pests such as slugs and snails that attack the leaves. You may try picking them off by hand, peculiarly after rain or use a snail trap of beer in a glass jar 1/2 sunken into the ground. They creep in, get drunk and drown. There is likewise the finely crushed egg shells circle, that you put around each plant which they hate crawling over. There is a new product for pots, which is a copper strip that you attach around the pot. There is also a spray to repel them with but I haven’t tried it.

If you are having disturb with caterpillars, then I suggest using an organic spray called Dipel which the active ingredient is Bacillus thuringiensis. It won’t injure you, your children, pets or other beneficial insects. Longlife pyrethrum is likewise good for sap sucking insects such as white fly and aphids, but likewise kills caterpillars.

In regards to lady birds there are the good one and the bad ones. The bad ones are known as the 28 spotted ones and they eat the leaves, so you need to watch out for them and pick them off by hand.

The sickness pumpkins are most prone too are powdery mildew and it may disseminate genuinely speedily in hot humid conditions. To try and control this disease you may use cows milk, sprayed on the leaves each two weeks with a solution of 1 part cows milk to 10 constituents water. The good lady birds identified by yellow and black bands and they eat the mildew, so don’t kill them. I likewise commend watering in the morning, no overhead watering but watering at ground level to prevent the spores being splashed up onto the leaves.

Harvesting and storing

The best percentage of growing pumpkins, is harvesting them. You have watch them grow, nutured them, no pests or impairment of normal physiological functions have got them and then you think, I don’t know when to harvest them. Well it takes amongst 3-4 months, they will have to be a nice colour, sound hallow when you knock on them and the skin ought to be hard and not show any indentations if you press you finger nails into them. It is genuinely important that you cut them off with at least 5-10cm of the stalk attached. This prevents mound entering into the pumpkin and helps to length their storage life.

Picking the right storage space is necessary if you want to have pumpkin out of season. It needs to be well ventilated, no direct sun light and cool. It also needs to arid and not damp. The pumpkin likewise needs to be healthy, no breaks in the flesh and there must be no sign of mould. If there is, then eat it straight away, it won’t store.

Final tip to help them grow healthful and strong is to feed them every second week with a potash and liquid manure drink. Can be cow, sheep manure or worm liquid.

For pumpkins to grow successfully, they need to have rich organic soil, be in full sun, good weather and regular moisture. If you follow these simple guidelines and the weather is consistent neither too hot or too cold, you will have lovely healthful pumpkins which you will be capable to store and eat and eat when it is out of season.

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