Giant pumpkin plants not looking good

[squeezyjohn]

I bought some giant pumpkin seed from www.giantvegetableseed.co.uk this year for a bit of a laugh as my kids were goading me in to growing the biggest I could.

The plants are now massive and rampant, with plenty of secondary rooting - growing in last years muck-heap.  The first female flowers have just emerged ... finally!  But they are not pumpkin shaped at all - they look elongated and much more like the blue banana squash I grew a couple of years ago.  Am I being paranoid ... I'm starting to feel like these seeds weren't entirely what they were being sold as.

Do some giant strains start off long and fatten out?

[squeezyjohn]

[squeezyjohn]

anyone?  If these plants are going to do nothing then I'd quite like to rip them out and put something else in there ... as 2 plants are taking up the space of a decent year's potato patch!!!!

[pumkinlover]

Have you anything that you really want to plant at the moment? If not I'd at least wait and see, sometimes life isn't what we plan but ok any way

[goodlife]

You ain't gonna get round shaped pumpkin out of 'banana' kind. Some round ones may start as slightly oval and will round up or stretch into weird shape as they grow on..but it is distinctly long very early on..then it does sound like you've been sold 'duff'.
But...let it grow and see what it will be...though if it has only just started grow, it will be too late to achieve huge one.

[Deb P]

Hmm, I'd be tempted to take a photo and send it to your seed company to complain...

[Tee Gee]

The clue is here;

The plants are now massive and rampant,

The plants are putting more effort into producing runners and leaves than forming fruit.

If you are going for 'giants' you want to limit this by cutting off growth a few leaves after the first flower has set!

Plus only allow one pumpkin to grow per plant.

With my pumpkins which I only grow to be lanterns for my grandkids at Halloween I just leave the plants to their own devices so that I get many pumpkins around the size of a soccer ball.

[Dandytown]

Definitely need a picture to decide.  More often than not the pumpkins that a plant puts out are the same shape and sometimes they can be uncharacteristically elongated.  Need a picture.

[squeezyjohn]

I haven't got a picture ... but they are definitely banana squash!  I grew them 2 years ago and they look identical.   And I think I probably got things mixed up in the greenhouse myself ... I sowed blue banana squash seeds at the same time as the giant pumpkins.  They never germinated at all ... but I must have got the labels the wrong way round.

So it seems I have done www.giantvegetableseed.co.uk an injustice .... their giant pumpkin seeds do not come out as banana squash type plants ... they just don't germinate at all!

[chriscross1966]

Atlantic GIant (adn they'll be a heavily selected variant of AG) can be a bugger to get started.... I always give it 3" pots in my thermostatic controlled propagator set to 28 degrees.... previously I've bunged them in with the other outdoor cucurbits I grow and they don't germinate in the rather cooler 8w fixed ones, they just rot, meanwhile around them, marketmore cucumbers, Winter Festival squash, Becky pumpkins and all manner of courgettes and gherkins are racing away....

[squeezyjohn]

Thanks for that ... in which case I'll count my blessings and stick to growing food rather than competition curiosities!

There's no way I'm going to be wasting electricity in March keeping a pumpkin seed at 28º when proper food just gets on and grows!