I am new with this as well. I love Kabocha squash and I had saved some seeds from one I bought at the health food store a few years ago. I was late in planting, probably late July and it took them about a month to really get going. The male flowers came first followed by the females about 3 weeks later. It is now August 2 and we just hand pollinated our first female flower this morning. I am so excited! We don't have many pollinators in this area and I had read before that if you want to ensure you get fruit you should probably hand pollinate, so, that is what we did. I planted only two squash this year. We have about 10 more female flowers that are not mature enough to open yet. I check them every day because the flowers are only open for a very short time, so, the window of opportunity is very small. I can't wait to watch the babies grow. I am hoping I can get about 10 squash off of the two plants. I have read you are lucky if you get one per vine, but, with hand pollinating I am hoping for at least two. I now have 5 vines growing. They are very aggressive and seem to take over whatever is in their path. I have a second year carrot growing for the seeds and the squash seems to be taking it down, literally. I also have spearmint growing to the side and so far I have been able to detour the squash by simply picking up the vine and moving it away from the spearmint. If you move them as they are first growing outward they seem easily deterred. I didn't have to move them much, maybe only 5 inches. I love these plants and have gotten a lot of joy out of watching. I water them every night when the sun goes down. I planted them in a manure enriched soil I bought at Walmart. I have not used any other fertilizer on them and they are growing great. However, I did read that the key to growing these squash is Patience, patience, patience. They are not something that grows overnight. Also, don't be too anxious to harvest them. They are suppose to stay on the vine until the vine dries up and falls away from the fruit. In the end they stem looks like that of a pumpkin. I hope you are enjoying your plants as much as I am mine. I am planning to plant a lot more next year and in a place in the yard where they have lots of room to branch out without worrying about them taking over any other plants. Good luck to you. :)

Hey walkin -- I'm *far* from an expert on this--people here helped me on the one I've done. I bought a kit of the precut wood and MDF parts, complete with screws and such, truth be told, just because I didn't want to have to do all the measuring and cutting--sometimes I hit "tilt" and have to take the easy way out. The kit was from eBay. We did buy better foam, however, than the kit came with. And we also wrapped it. Probably way overdoing it. It wasn't hard at all, in fact rather enjoyable in an instant-gratification kind of way (esp. since I didn't have to do the cutting :))--we did do two rows of staples, alternating spaces kind of like sewing stitches, because the fabric seemed to pull between the stitches so I wanted it anchored completely. We didn't edge it with wood, but we could--we just did a simple rectangle which extends 24" above the surface of the mattress (we have a high mattress--if you were to purchase the same set and not have as high a mattress setup, it would be taller unless you cut it down). We love the simple lines. It would be easy to put wood around this if we chose to, or to make a slipcover for it down the line.

Hi Dann, 2/3 seasons to full size. good luck Peter r

Depends on MANY factors. In a tightly controlled environment such as a nursery pot, where you can control rootball size (pot size), water, and fertilizer, you could get 3'-4'+ of growth. The hard part of pushing them that hard is the new growth may not harden off completely. A foot of growth would be for a reasonably healthy landscape tree in a lawn without extra watering and fairly nutrient poor soil. Stressed trees would grow less but most young Sugar Maples would do 1'-2', occasionally more in ideal locations.