Why did my little pumpkin suddenly get brown & soft?
Question:My soil is mostly sandy. I have amended the soil with amonium sulfate. The vine looked great, then after over 2" of rainfall in one evening, the leaves turned yellow, wilted with the sunshine & the pumpkin got soft & brown.
Answers:
Probably either one of two things happened.
1.) You fertilized too much. When it rained, that fertilizer finally got to the roots. However because it was too much fertilizer it could have killed it.
2.) It rained too much and the roots of the plant rotted because the plant was located in too wet of a spot and the roots drowned from being in the water too long.
I'd most probably guess the first one of the two as being the more probable cause.
In the last year or two there have been some pumpkin diseases that have started popping up that have made pumpkins just rot and die but normally that happens to them when they are about full size and your pumpkin shouldn't be near full size by now.
Sounds like it got burned from th fertilizer. Too much nitrogen will cause the fruit to die.
Amending the soil usually refers to changing the structure of the soil- adding sand to clay soil, adding compost, etc. You fertilized- you don't say how much you added.
Pumpkins are very suspectible to bacterial wilt and powdery mildew... your symptoms are common in wilt. If wilt is the problem, there's no cure.
Good luck next time. Check out the link I added. UC Davis has a tremendous amount of great info!
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