Topic: Pumpkins - a virgin's guide?

[shifty581]

Hello this is Mel aka "DUG"
I am working for a pittance on shifty's allotment and I have just planted my first pumpkin seeds. As i have never grown anything at all before (apart from growing cress in a empty eggshell at school!) is there anything i should be aware of???

I have also planted butternut squash seeds - will it help them grow if i wear Shifty's cap for ever! I keep talking to them this should encourage them i am told? Please let me know the do's and dont's!  :-*

[gavin]

Only done it twice myself - so hope there's better advice coming along!  But butternut gave me beautiful fruit, which stored for months and months!

I've just sown half of mine now - but inside;  I'll put them out in mid- to late May.

For the others, in mid-May (but I'm in Leeds), I'll make a "good spade" hole, and fill it with compost and soil, made up to a mound; I'll sow two seeds in each - and sink a bottomless pop bottle upside down into the mound.  I'll take out the weaker of the two seedlings.

Cover your seeds with at least a pop bottle cloche?

They need lots of water down in the roots - hence the pop bottle!  And I feed them every so often with comfrey tea,  or equivalent after the fruits have started to swell.

If you want big fruits, limit the plant to two or three fruit per plant - just nip out the growing tip.

Good luck - Gavin

[philcooper]

I second Gavin's advice - I've just sown some pumkins in 7cm square plastic pots in a propagator in the GH, 2 varieties were through in 4 days.

I'll grow them as I did cucumbers last year, between sweet corn

I grow on 4ft beds planting the corn 15" apart. I plant 2 squash at each end of the 15ft long bed in place of the end row of corn and they flourish (well the cus did) in the part shade and reduce the moist lioss from between the corn

[Doris_Pinks]

I grow my trailing winter squash upwards, on trellises, in trenches 12" deep,12" wide filled with  well rotted manure, leaving about an inch drop in the trench, I find this helps with the watering as I just lob a bucket of water in and it soaks immediately down to the roots along the trnch. Trenches are 4 feet long so I usually allow 2 plants per row.
My Pumpkins sprawl around under the sweetcorn, which I plant through weed supressing membrane. I dig a large hole, fill with manure, and plonk in my Pumpkin,with a pop bottle too! as has been said they are very thirsty and hungry plants!  Hope this helps  DP

[shifty581]

Thanks for all your help, Tony says i can plant sume Peas if i am a good girl.
Mel  ;)

[Ceri]

I sowed some Atlantic Giants for my boy at the weekend and have just noticed they are coming through in my plastic mini greenhouse outside.  I've got a 4 stack of tyres, lined with dpm (coz John Miller said tyres can leach), filled with strawy manure and compost which will be topped off with soil for them to grow in when they are bigger.