Are my Pumpkins on Schedule?
Question:I live in northern Minnesota. I have two pumpkin plants. I’m trying Atlantic Giants for the first time. They spent 12 days in a peat pot after they germinated and were then put in the ground around memorial day. So they have been in the ground for nearly a month now. They seemed to do fine in the ground but they didn’t grow much. We did have a couple of wet weeks in the early-middle part of this month and each plant had a leaf that turned yellow and died.
Both plants have started to take off this past week. They went from about 1 ½ feet long to almost 3 feet long in seven days. I now also (just yesterday) saw the start of flowers.
So I have a couple of questions.
Are my vine lengths on schedule? In the past when I grew pumpkins I seem to remember my vines being longer by this point in the year.
Are my plants flowering too soon on too short of a vine? And if so, what will this produce and is there anything I can do to correct this problem?
Answers:
I live in central Oklahoma. I grow pumpkins every year, and I never prune them. Or worry about them. I just throw the old pumpkins near my compost heap and next spring they start over! At first, many of the blooms turn into little "pumpkins" the size of eggs, then the pumpkins get soft and rot. Later the vines produce bigger ones. I had 3 dozen pumpkins from 3 vines last year. (It's a little early to plant pumpkins, but mine plant themselves.)
The length has nothing to do with you pumpkin crop you need to prune - look at this article.
http://www.megagro.com/pdf/guide-to-grow...
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