Growing your own pumpkins is so much fun. Watching the vines grow, the flowers bloom and the little gourds form is really exciting. They require 6-8 hours of sunlight a day, rich soil improved with compost, and plenty of room 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, it depends on what you bought in the supermarket and the seeds that went to the compost. They do have some weird traits and it 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’re going to get a pumpkin and find that it has fallen. Why do you wonder, what happened, what am I doing wrong? My answer is – probably nothing. Pumpkins are known for not producing fruit.

Pumpkins belong to the Cucurbita genus and the Cucurbitaceae family which includes squash, watermelon, rock melon, butternut squash, cucumbers, and squash. The word pumpkin originates from the word “pepon”, which is Greek for “big melon”. It is classified as a vine and needs a lot of room to grow. Pumpkins 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 ground

Pumpkins like a soil pH between 6 and 7.2. If your soil is on the acid side, I suggest adding a little lime and if it’s on the high, alkaline side, then you can bring it down by applying sulfur. To prepare the soil for pumpkins, I suggest you incorporate a lot of compost and cow or sheep manure. A good handful of blood and bones 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 chill sets in. The soil also needs to drain well and if your soil is clay I suggest you mound it with a good quality loam. This will raise its roots above the clay and poor drainage.

Locating your Pumpkin

Pumpkins need a lot of space and can soften other plants if left unchecked. Now, if you have a small garden and don’t want to be overrun by the triffids, 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 off the ground 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 off, it won’t hurt them!

propagation of pumpkins

The best time to plant pumpkin seeds is in spring, when 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 like, but the garden soil should still be over 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 4-5 cm 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 weakest ones, the mound will be overcrowded and none of the pumpkins will thrive. If you don’t want to ignore them, replant them somewhere else in the garden.

Favorable conditions

Pumpkins 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 don’t like scorching temperatures and will die down 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 don’t like to be water stressed and they don’t like the flood and famine irrigation regimen. You can make them split. They like even 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 strong winds can cause woodiness, making the squash very unpalatable to eat. It is also believed that too much wind can cause scarring of the meat.

The vine takes about 10 weeks before it begins to produce flowers and the males come first. They are on long, thin stems (called pedicels) and there are many more than females. If you look inside the male flower, you will 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 4-hour period. At noon they begin to slowly close and by dusk 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 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 flower nectar.
• plant french lavender Lavanduala denaturedIt blooms almost all year.
• Plant Lots of Iceland Poppies – Honey Bees Love Them
• Provide water to the bees, 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 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 using a toothbrush. To hand pollinate, pick male flowers, remove the petals, and 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 it over the stigma, but it didn’t work. I suggest you try the first method.

To save 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 pumpkin and date. I guarantee that if you don’t you will have forgotten in a while, what variety it is.

Pumpkins are famous for cross-pollinating with each other, so to ensure they are true to type, save seeds from a variety grown in isolation. You may need to hand pollinate it to ensure there is no pollen contamination.

Why is my Pumpkin not producing Fruit?

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

• Pumpkins are sensitive to weather and temperature. If it’s too hot, too cold, too windy, or too rainy, 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 close, until conditions become more suitable.
• Seeds less than 3 years old are believed 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 gourds.
• 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 bear fruit.
• One trick to try to encourage more female flowers is to cut off the apical (aka terminal) bud (upper growing point) and encourage lateral (lateral) growth.
• When preparing the bed, be sure to incorporate some potash (it encourages blooms) and don’t put in too much nitrogen, for example. blood and bone, causing excessive 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 snail trap with beer 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 pot product, which is a copper strip that goes around the pot. There is also a spray to repel them 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 bacillus thuringiensis. It will not harm you, your children, your pets or other beneficial insects. Long-lasting pyrethrum is also good for sap-sucking insects like whiteflies and aphids, but it also kills caterpillars.

When it comes to ladybugs, there are good ones and bad ones. The bad guys are known as the spotted 28 and they eat the leaves, so you have to be careful with 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, 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. The good bird ladies are identified by yellow and black bands and will eat mold, so don’t kill them. I also recommend watering in the morning, not watering from above but at ground level to prevent spores from splashing onto 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 do not know when to harvest them. Well, it takes about 3-4 months, they should be a nice color, sound hallowed when you touch them, and the skin should be hard and not show any indentations if you press your fingernails against them. It is very important that you cut them with at least 5-10 cm of the stem attached. This prevents mounds from getting into the gourd and helps lengthen its shelf life.

Choosing the right storage space is essential if you want 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 squash 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 piece of advice to help them grow healthy and strong is to feed them fortnightly with a potash drink and liquid manure. It can be cow manure, sheep manure or liquid from worms.

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 it’s out of season.