horse manure and some liquid feed and thats about it oh yes as mentioned lots and lots of water
Hi Johnny
I have been thinking about your water problem i.e. you work off an artesian system rather than say me who works off mains surface water i.e. reservoirs.
As I see it Pumpkins want a little water often rather than a blast once a day, particularly during high summer.
Now I seem to recall you have lots of water butts around the plot and I thought you might be able to use one of those as an irrigation system.
How does this idea grab you?
Fit a stop tap to one of your butts then connect it to a plain hose (as opposed to leaky) and lead it to your pumpkin bed, for protection you could possibly run it through a conduit e.g a fall pipe or piece of scaffold pole.
Then connect this to a small reservoir e.g. a bucket with a lid ( this will also double as a 'feed' chamber) then lead a leaky hose out of the reservoir and lace that around your punpkins.
To control it all you need to do is switch on/off at the water butt as an when you consider the pumpkins need watering.
Subject to the ammount and volume of water required you could adjust your trickle hose to give you the desired effect you want.
Then subject to the rainfall you get you can keep topping up the water butt which I think will be simpler than watering your plants from a can.
In terms of feeding you can use the reservoir like a hose end feeder and add your fertiliser, or any other concoction you brew into it e.g. Nettle/Comfrey/Fowl/Animal tea. This will mix with the incoming flow of water and discharge as a liquid fertiliser.
To ensure that the water is agitated enough to mix with the brew have the inlet pipe a bit higher that the discharge pipe and the falling water will agitate/mix the brew.
I have seen a similar system work on Dahlia beds where each bed fed off a ring main that entered the feeding reservoirs (one per bed) then the leaky hose was fed out of these.
The beauty of this system was certain varieties of Dahlias required a different watering/feeding regime so each bed could be controlled from the reservoirs. If you adopted a similar system your regime would not be quite as complicated, that is assuming that you don't start irrigating other parts of your plot from the same irrigation system.
I will leave you to think about it and if thereI faild to dot any eyes or crossed any T's give me a shout....Tg
