This Summer: Grow Your Own Pumpkins For Halloween!
What came first, the pumpkin or its seeds? Well, pumpkins come from seeds and seeds come from pumpkins. Therefore the answer is obvious, or is it? While you contemplate on this issue, please allow me to proceed on to a few other related matters.
If you have a vegetable garden that you take great pride in and tend to its needs on a daily basis you must also be growing pumpkins. If, however, you have not yet included pumpkins into your garden’s overall population you should because growing pumpkins is a gardener’s litmus test of his or her true horticultural skills.
Because there is a huge variety in the pumpkin arena, you should first decide which pumpkins to would want to grow. You might even decide to grow two or three different kinds of pumpkins because they are quite neighborly toward one another. The most popular among the commercially grown pumpkins and the one most frequently used to create Jack O’ Lanterns is the Connecticut Field Pumpkin. This common pumpkin tends to be round with a bright orange outer skin, it generally weighs between ten to twenty pounds although it has been known to grow up to fifty pounds and its flavor is a bit watery and quite bland. Some of the other varieties come in an assortment of shapes (round, oval, squat or tall), colors (white, pink, green and orange), sizes (ranging from one pound to five hundred pounds) as well as flavors. They also bear strange sounding names such as: Baby Boo, Munchkin, Spooktacular, Big Max, Cinderella, Lumina, Atlantic Giant, … and many more.
To start your own pumpkin patch, seeds must be acquired. You can get them from inside a pumpkin in which case you will have to dry them in the open air, not in the oven. The other option is to purchase pumpkin seeds at your local nursery. Pumpkins and their seeds love the sun. For best results you should therefore plant your pumpkin seeds in mid or late spring when the days have gotten longer, when temperature stay consistently above seventy degrees Fahrenheit and in a spot that will provide at least six hours of direct sunlight every day.
To speed up the process of sprouting, you might want soften the pumpkin seeds’ outer shell by soaking them in water the night before planting. Pumpkin seeds are usually planted in the middle of small mounds surrounded by moats that hold water around the plants’ roots. Each mount of approximately three feet in diameter can hold four or five seeds arranged in a circle and roughly seven inch apart. If you are planning several mounts be sure that they are at least ten feet apart. Pumpkin seeds know which way is up but you might want to help them by placing each seed on its side with the narrow edge pointing toward the sun. Protect your planted pumpkin seeds by covering them with an inch of moist (never soaking) and loosely packed soil. Pumpkins love water but not so much that it will rot the roots. Watering should be done with a slow sprinkle rather than a harsh torrent that can potentially wash away the needed soil and harm the seedling. So, please water very gently; especially in the beginning stages.
Pumpkin plants have a tendency to spread out every which way but pruning and training them regularly will keep them in check and even strengthen their stocks which will ultimately help them thrive. To ensure that the fruit grows evenly round, you might want to periodically adjust its position — but please be very careful not to hurt it. Sometimes around August or September, when the color of the fruit has deepened while the plant shows obvious signs of distress it is time to harvest your pumpkins. To help them stay fresh as long as possible, leave several inches of the stems when cutting them off their vines and allow them to cure in the sun for ten days but cover them at night. Storing your pumpkins in a dry cool place could preserve them into the following Spring but you were going to carve them, were you not?
That is what I call a home made Jack O’ Lantern from scratch but I still do not know what came first the pumpkin or its seeds?
Posted in Pumpkin Stencils
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