Growing your own pumpkins is a lot of fun. Watching the vines grow, the flowers bloom and little pumpkins form is truly exciting. They require 6-8 hours of sunlight per day, rich soil enhanced with compost, and plenty of space or something to climb on. They are extremely easy to grow and can sprout from your compost, without any help from you. The variety, well, who knows, depends on what you bought at the supermarket and what seeds went into the compost. They have some strange traits and can be very frustrating when the vine is extremely healthy and you only get male flowers. It can also be extremely devastating if you think you are going to get a pumpkin only to find that it has fallen. Why do you wonder, what happened, what am I doing wrong? My answer is – probably nothing. Pumpkins are notorious for not producing fruit.

Pumpkins belong to the genus Cucurbita and the family Cucurbitaceae which includes zucchini, watermelon, rock melon, squash, cucumbers, and squash. The word pumpkin originates from the word “pepón”, which in Greek means “big melon”. It is classified as a vine and needs a lot of space to grow. Gourds are monoecious, meaning they have both male and female flowers on the same plant, so you only need one plant to produce fruit.

preparing the soil

Pumpkins like a soil pH between 6 and 7.2. If your soil is on the acidic side I suggest adding a bit of gardeners lime and if it is on the high alkaline side then you can bring it down by applying sulfur. To prepare the soil for the pumpkins, I suggest incorporating plenty of compost and cow or sheep manure. A good handful of blood and bone plus potash will do the trick. Pumpkins are an annual crop and need rich, organic soil so they can grow quickly and produce fruit before the winter cold sets in. The soil also needs to drain well and if your soil is clayey I suggest mounding it with a good quality loam. This will raise their roots above the clay and poor drainage.

Locating your Pumpkin

Pumpkins need a lot of space and can overpower other plants if left unchecked. Now, if you have a small garden and don’t want to be overrun by trifid plants, I suggest growing them next to a fence or shed or putting up a trellis and training the tendrils. The good thing about tying them down is that it keeps the fruit out of the soil from pests like slugs and snails and diseases like mold. If space is not an issue, let them roam. You will see that you have a floating sea of ​​large pumpkin leaves enveloping your garden. If they get into any mischief, cut them down, it won’t hurt them!

pumpkin propagation

The best time to plant pumpkin seeds is in the spring, when the soil and air temperatures are warming. If you start them in the vegetable garden, the soil temperature should be at least 20°C for germination and the air temperature 22°C. You can start them in pots in a greenhouse if you wish, but the garden soil should still have more than 20 ° C when you plant them. They do not like cold or frost.

When planting the seed directly in the garden, make a mound about 1/2 meter wide and plant 3-4 seeds about 4-5cm deep. Depending on the warmth of the soil, they should sprout within 7-10 days. When the baby seedlings have 4-6 leaves, pinch off the weaker plants and leave the stronger ones. If you don’t remove the weaker ones, the mound will be overcrowded and none of the pumpkins will thrive. If you don’t want to ignore them, replant them in another spot in the garden.

Favorable conditions

Gourds are grown in the summer, they need 70-120 days before they are ready to harvest and that is usually in early to mid fall. Pumpkins do not like scorching temperatures and will wilt and stop growing. They have shallow roots, wilt easily, and so it is important to prepare the soil with plenty of compost and animal manure to help increase the soil’s water-holding capacity. If the soil holds its water, then it is available for the plant to replace the moisture it is losing through its leaves. Pumpkins do not like to be water stressed and do not like the flood and famine irrigation regime. You can make them split. They like uniform watering and the best time is in the morning. If you water at night and the leaves get wet, powdery mildew may appear. Pumpkins do not like the wind and must be protected from it. Heat and high winds can cause woodiness, making squash very unpalatable to eat. It is also believed that too much wind can cause scarring on the flesh.

The vine takes about 10 weeks before it begins to produce flowers and the males are the first. They are on long, slender stalks (called pedicels) and there are many more than females. If you look inside the male flower, you’ll find a long, thin structure called a stamen that produces pollen. The female flowers have a shorter pedicel and sit closer to the vine. If you look 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.

fertilize the ovary

The flowers only open for 1 day; Just before sunrise, the flower petals begin to unfurl and open over a period of 4 hours. By noon they begin to slowly close and by evening they have closed permanently. Pumpkins are pollinated by insects, especially native and honey bees, so it’s important to encourage them into your garden. It is common for the ovary of the female flowers to swell and begin to look like a pumpkin is forming. But disaster, it turns brown and falls off. This happens because it has not been fertilized due to lack of bees. There are several things you can do to encourage them:

  • Do not use systemic sprays (poisons that are absorbed into the plant and can last for several weeks), as many of them kill bees when they eat nectar from flowers.
  • plant french lavender skimmed lavandulaIt blooms almost all year.
  • Plant Lots of Iceland Poppies – Honey Bees Love Them
  • Provide the bees with water, they will tell their friends and more bees will visit.

Now, if the weather has been brutal, either too hot or too cold, and you notice that there aren’t many bees buzzing around, you can try fertilizing them yourself. There are 2 methods, pollinate by hand using the male flower or by using a toothbrush. To hand pollinate, pick male flowers, remove the petals, then apply the pollen to the stigma of the female flowers. I tried the toothbrush method once, where you gently brush the toothbrush over the stamen, then gently brush over the stigma, but it didn’t work. I suggest you try the first method.

To save the seeds from harvested pumpkins, store them for a month, then scoop out the pulp, wash it, and dry the seeds on a paper towel. Then store them in a clean, dry glass jar in a cool, dry place, away from sunlight. It’s also a good idea to label the bottle with the variety of gourd and date. I guarantee that if you don’t you will have forgotten in a while what variety it is.

Pumpkins are notorious for cross-pollinating with one another, so to ensure they’re true to type, save the seeds of a variety grown in isolation. You may need to hand pollinate it to ensure there is no pollen contamination.

Why doesn’t my Pumpkin produce Fruit?

I mentioned earlier that pumpkins are notorious for not producing fruit and there are many reasons for this.

  • Pumpkins are sensitive to weather and temperature. If it’s too hot, too cold, too windy, or too much rain, you may not get fruit. I suggest you try hand pollination, especially if temperatures are above 30°C. Remember, if the weather is eradicant and temperatures fluctuate widely; then many plants shut down, until conditions become more suitable.
  • Seeds less than 3 years old are thought to produce more male than female flowers.
  • Lack of insects in your garden. Bees, ants, and other insects are vital in the pollen transfer process. If they are not present, the pollen will not be transferred to the female flower, so there will be no pumpkins.
  • Heavy rains can damage the pollen, which means that even if it is transferred by insects, it will not fertilize the flower and therefore will not set fruit.
  • One trick to try to encourage more female flowers is to cut off the apical (aka terminal) bud (top point of growth) and encourage lateral (lateral) growth.
  • When you prepare the bed, be sure to incorporate some potash (it encourages the flowers) and don’t put too much nitrogen, for example. blood and bone, causing excess leaf growth.

Plagues and diseases

There are the normal pests like slugs and snails that attack the leaves. You can try removing them by hand, especially after rain, or use a beer snail trap in a glass jar half sunk into the ground. They come in, get drunk and get drunk. There’s also the circle of finely crushed eggshells, which you place around each plant they hate to crawl on. There is a new product for pots, which is a copper strip that is placed around the pot. There is also a spray to scare them away but I have not tried it.

If you have problems with caterpillars, I suggest you use an organic spray called Dipel, the active ingredient of which is thuringiensis bacillus. It will not harm you, your children, your pets or other beneficial insects. Long-lasting pyrethrum is also good for sap-sucking insects such as whiteflies and aphids, but it also kills caterpillars.

When it comes to ladybugs, there are good and bad. The bad guys are known as the spotted 28 and they eat the leaves so you have to be careful around them and pick them up by hand.

The disease that pumpkins are most prone to is also powdery mildew and it can spread very quickly in hot and humid conditions. To try to control this disease, cow’s milk can be used, sprayed on the leaves every two weeks with a solution of 1 part cow’s milk to 10 parts water. Good bird ladies are identified by yellow and black bands and will eat the mold, so don’t kill them. I also recommend watering in the morning, not watering from above, but watering at ground level to prevent spores from splashing on the leaves.

harvest and storage

The best part of growing pumpkins is harvesting them. You have seen them grow, you have nurtured them, they have not contracted pests or diseases and then you think, I don’t know when to harvest them. Well it takes 3-4 months, they should be a nice color, sound hallowed when you touch them and the skin should be tough and show no indentations if you press your fingernails against them. It is very important that you cut them with at least 5-10cm of the stem attached. This prevents the mounds from getting into the gourd and helps extend its shelf life.

Choosing the right storage space is essential if you want to keep pumpkins out of season. It needs to be well ventilated, out of direct sunlight and cool. It also needs to dry and not get wet. The pumpkin should also be healthy, with no breaks in the flesh and no signs of mold. If there is, eat it immediately, it will not be stored.

The last tip to help them grow healthy and strong is to feed them biweekly with a potash drink and liquid manure. It can be cow dung, sheep or worm liquid.

In order for pumpkins to grow successfully, they need rich organic soil, full sun, good weather, and regular moisture. If you follow these simple guidelines and the weather is even, not too hot and not too cold, you’ll have beautiful, healthy pumpkins that you can store, eat, and eat when you’re out of season.