I bought one of these magnificent squashes at a car boot sale years ago and have been hankering for another ever since with no luck.
This year however I have several healthy plants flowering and spreading gaily around my garden with the possibility of bushels of yummy Crown Prince squashes in the future. :blob7:
The trouble is, I have no clue what to do next. I am watering daily and it has had a couple of doses of miracle grow and a couple of 20-10-10. It has lots of flowers and foliage and tiny, pea sized fruits. Do I just leave it to do its own thing? It seems to want to climb.... :icon_scratch:
Be careful if you want it to climb. They can get quite big and heavy. My largest was about 16lb. I just feed mine comfrey liquid and leave it alone to do what it wants. Also when fruits grow bung straw underneath the fruit to lift it off the soil. I do only one or two fruits per plant.
20-10-10 is for leafy plants so i'd rather go for comfrey tea or a low nitrogen fertilizer.. i.e. High potash for fruiting is required. The miracle grow is good as a general fert..
My miracle grow is 24-8-12.
If you do not have a handy bucket full of comfrey stinking its way round your garden, I would suggest blood, fish and bone, or perhaps tomato fertilizer. Curcurbits love biomatter, so I give mine a mulch of compost a good bucket full, or a large pile of weedkiller free lawn clippings, once they have a an initial heat up and gone brown. Or even a large pile of weeds the pumpkin will not let them grow beneath it.