Pumpkin Passion

Wow, what a difference a month makes! These suckers grow FAST! My garden is now completely overwrought with pumpkin plants. In fact, my poor bell peppers and jalapenos are fighting for some serious space. I have 8 fully thriving pumpkin plants. I am not sure what type survived, I believe two of the plants are the white pumpkins and the other six are your typical orange. What a surprise we will have in the fall. They are still fairly contained in the garden, but I am expecting them to start creeping on to the lawn this month. If they grew this fast from May to June, I can only imagine how fast they are going to grow now that we are coming into the full charge of summer. I do not see any baby pumpkins just yet, but the little corkscrew vines are starting.

No wonder people garden, it is totally fun! It was pretty tedious clearing the old plants out, but once I started planting it has been pretty easy and it is really neat to watch everything flourish! Along with the pumpkins, I had mentioned in my first blog posting that I had planted summer squash, and red bell pepper. I have since added jalapenos, more colors of bell peppers, mint and basil. Unfortunately, we have had a casualty, the parsley did not make it. I believe it was a combination of factors: First, the summer squash was not a good neighbor for the parsley. It took over the whole area and I think it just strangled it. Second, the space was in full sun. Parsley is a little more delicate than I though and I should have babied it in a windowsill in the house. However everything else is just beautiful, so I shall grieve and move on.

So the porch worked. Sometimes a little sunlight goes a long way…I was able to get 4 plants to sprout. So 4 out of the 24 planted is not great odds, but I am getting impatient with these little greenhouse trays. In fact I am growing more mold in some of them than I am actually pumpkin plant. Consequently I gave them to Mother Nature and planted them directly in the garden.

When I was planting the baby sprouts, I did go through the other sections in the seed tray and I noticed that several of the seeds had developed roots but had not gotten as far as sprouting leaves. So I shoved those in the ground too. I figure if it was on its way, then hopefully the actual soil, sun and water of being outside will further the process along. We shall see! My baby tiny garden is on its way! If in a few weeks if I have killed everything, I will just resume my regular tradition of buying my pumpkins at the local grocery store in October. I will keep you posted.

In a week’s time we have a couple of sprouts, I am so proud! However, before I run around the house in exuberant cheer… the remaining 23 are yielding absolutely nothing thus far. They seem to be a little too wet…enough so that I seeing what appears to be mold growing on a few. With that being said, I understand that this is a learning experience and I am just going to try things out.

I removed the netting that was around each peat pellet, I was hoping that this would encourage better water evaporation. Then I moved the little guys outside just for a mini field trip. We get some afternoon sun on our front porch and I thought that maybe the little greenhouse carton was not warming up enough. The directions say not to put them in direct sunlight, so I have used a shoe box to shield them from the light but still give them the actual warmth.

I am going to do this for about another week and see if I can yield better results…if not I shall go to the store and buy the already started pumpkin plants and use those instead. I am not above admitting defeat with seeds, but I refuse to surrender completely. We WILL have pumpkins growing in the back yard this Autumn!

Yvette and I have found a spot in our backyard in one of the flower beds and our beginning the pumpkin planting process. I cleared the current occupant and tilled up all of the soil. We had purchased two bags of top soil called “Amend”, which supposedly was good for planting flowers and plants (says the 18 year old cashier at the store). It was organic and enriched with plant food already. After the flower bed was all tilled up and the old plants removed, I emptied the bags of top soil and spread it evenly throughout the garden.

We had purchased a small “flower bed” fence which was about 24” tall to keep our dog out of it. Along with the pumpkin seeds, we also bought small plants that were ready to plant in the ground: summer squash, a red bell pepper plant and some parsley. I chose one end and planted all three of them. The remaining part of the garden will be for the pumpkins (once they germinate and are ready for the outside).

Though our flower bed is somewhat small, I have heard that pumpkins do not get a deep root system. The biggest challenge will be the space needed for the pumpkin vines. Several websites say to just let them grow out on the lawn (as they do not attach past their root system-the site of planting). It can be inconvenient, but it is only for a few months. Now we have a plan and are set to grow!

Along with the Sesame Street greenhouse, we also purchased a seed pack of white pumpkins, a second green house tray and a little individual cup/kit pumpkin thing. It is like a personal greenhouse for just a few seeds. It was cute and Yvette had to have it.

You start with adding warm water to the peat pellets which are inside the greenhouse tray. As the water penetrates them they expand. You tear open the little netting at the top of the pellet and bury a couple of seeds into each one. I then added a little bit more water as I thought they felt a little dry when I was planting my seeds. Note: I did not have any excess water floating in the tray, the peat pellets were completely expanded and saturated, but there was no excess water.

I completed this process with both trays, all of the seeds and the individual pumpkin cup. The instructions said to pop the clear lid on them and put them in a warmer space but somewhere they will not get direct sun. I chose the top of a bookshelf in our “library”. This room does not get excessively cold and the seed trays are out of the way. So keep your fingers crossed that nature smiles down on our little experiment!

I will post periodically to show you our progress, probably a couple of times a month. If you have any tips for me, please leave a comment, I would love to have some advice! Autumn will be here before we know it (I get so excited thinking about it)! Though Yvette and I are completely falling into our “summer mode”, beach, barbeque, road trips, etc… I always keep a special place in the back of my head for fall, it is my favorite season. Until we meet again…

Hello Everyone!

I would like to introduce myself, I am Shannon–the famous “pumpkin passion” hand model and wife of Yvette. I am the new guest blogger on pumpkinpassion.com for the pumpkin growing section.

About a month ago we were at Home Depot when Yvette and I found these cute little plastic “greenhouse” kits with Sesame Street characters on the carton. They were labeled “My First Greenhouse”. We fell in love with them and knew that pumpkin growing needed to be blogged. Consequently, I figured this year I could buckle down and grow my own pumpkin patch. It would save us some money, I could be a rockin’ farmer person and it would be fun to document our progress on the blog.

Let me give you some of my back ground…I am not a farmer. I have never grown anything, possibly a houseplant but nothing to really boast about at backyard barbecues. The most farming/gardening experience I have ever had would be picking raspberries on a ranch up in Oak Glen, CA or being a “digital” farmer on everyone’s favorite networking site. Clearly this is a completely new experience, the choices I will make in this journey will be based off of info I locate on the web, maybe some advice from friends and hopefully a little common sense. So let’s see if we can get some pumpkins to sprout.