Old Timey Cornfield Pumpkin (w/ photos)
Macmex
14 years ago
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ilene_in_neok
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoRelated Discussions
Old timey cornfield pumpkin seed
Comments (14)Jay, Did you check the flowers to make sure you had both male and female flowers? Every now and then I'll have a pumpkin plant that will set only male or only female flowers. I don't know why. Normally the male flowers set first, followed by the female ones but every now and then all I see is male flowers. With two plants, though, I'd be surprised if they both set only flowers of the same sex in your garden. With the female flowers, they are only viable and receptive to pollination on the first day they open, so if you are going to try hand pollinating them, catch them on that first day, preferably in the morning. Other than the nitrogen excess that George mentioned as a possibility, I can't think of anything else except this: --a lack of bees or other pollinators to accomplish the task of carrying pollen from the male flowers to the female flowers, or --excessively dry soil. I have found that in a period of the worst summer drought conditions, the plants can stop producing if the soil gets too dry. They do flower but fruit doesn't form. It is as if they somehow "know" there isn't enough available moisture to make the fruit grow so they don't set any. Last year I guess I wasn't watering the Seminole pumpkins enough in July and early August and they went about a month without setting any new fruit. Then I wised up and watered them heavily and they exploded into bloom and set fruit like crazy. George, What bean varieties are making you crazy? With me, it is Insuk's Wang Kong. I got flowers and beans the first year from seeds I got from you at the last spring fling we had at the park in OKC, but not the next year. I bought seeds of it from Remy's seed company this past winter and am going to try again. I will plant half my seeds in spring and save the other half to plant in summer for fall. On the beans that aren't flowering for you, is there a chance they are day-length sensitive and our day-length is too short? Dawn...See MorePumpkin help, please
Comments (6)Tilling it in? Yeah, that probably was a bit too much manure and 'shrooms. I'd think that seeds or young plants of any kind would have a bit of trouble with that. A bit rich. Digging and mixing it by hand to about twelve to sixteen inches deep, you mighta got away with it. Preparing punkin hills from scratch? Only thing I can think of is to prepare some two foot square holes, about two feet deep, with a three-way mix of natural dirt, compost and composted manure and start over and transplant your punkins to the new 'digs' - if you'll pardon the pun. Usually, when I have the time, I'll let the prepared hill sit for a couple or three weeks before planting, if I can get away with it. With the beds in my current garden already being prepped to approx sixteen inches deep, I just go ahead and plant and be done with it. Mixing composted manure and 'shrooms into the soil with a tiller? In a bed for regular veggies?Yeah. Go kinda easy on it. An inch or so of either one, spread evenly across the bed, till it in, and you're generally good to go. Same with peat moss. Punkin roots, like watermelons, grow deep, as in two to three feet or more deep. That means that they take an entirely different approach wrt prep work. That means you gotta get out yer shovel and dig....See MoreAnyone starting Pumpkin seeds?
Comments (38)Bon, Pumpkin vines grow like nothing else, and you can use them to hide a multitude of sins. I like to plant them on the far edge of a garden and let them work their way inward, taking over real estate once covered by plants that have finished up and no longer are producing. I'd rather look at huge green leaves running rampantly throughout the garden than look at spent plants that are past their prime. In 2011's horrific heat and drought, the one thing I had that still looked really good in August was the Seminole plant....you couldn't even see where the corn, squash, tomatoes, etc. had grown because all those drought-killed, roasted, toasted plants were buried under Seminole's vines, and we harvested dozens of pumpkins right up until the first hard freeze. Even after that freeze, I found another dozen or two pumpkins buried under the dead foliage that I had missed when I harvested everything the afternoon before the freeze. Because Seminole is so hard-shelled, those frozen pumpkins weren't even damaged. I harvested them green, put them in the garden shed on a shelf, and they matured over a period of weeks and months. Nothing will make you feel like a super gardener any more than a rampantly running pumpkin vine that produces scads and scads of fruit. The downside, of course, is that they take over every available inch of space, so for gardeners with less space, their rampant growth can become a problem. Some years I let them climb the fence and thence run upward into the pecan trees. (I didn't plant any in that corner this year though.) By the time the pumpkins are turning from green to their mature buff color, it is autumn and to a person driving by or walking by, it looks like we have a pumpkin tree. One year Chris' large iguana, Alex, escaped from his cage and climbed to the top of a 40' tall pecan tree that had pumpkin vines running through it. Our neighbors were treated to the sight of an "alligator" climbing a pumpkin tree. One neighbor looked at it, stopped and talked to me, and said he needed to call his wife and warn her so she wouldn't wreck the car while looking at the alligator in the pumpkin tree. A lot of people think of pumpkins as kid stuff. If that is true, then I am just a big kid. Dawn...See MorePumpkin runner root area?
Comments (2)Larry, I suppose you can do it if you want to. I don't know of any reason why you shouldn't. It can only help the plants. Sometimes the newer growth is lighter merely because it is new, and then it turns darker as it ages.That could be all you're seeing. I'm all in favor of doing the watering and feeding because anything that makes the plants stronger also will make them more productive. If you don't want to have to worry about the grass going crazy, you could put down cardboard with mulch on top to smother most of that grass near the runners and just leave the soil bare right where the runners touch the ground so they can root into the ground as they grow. Dawn...See MoreMacmex
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoilene_in_neok
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agogldno1
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agofestus47
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoMacmex
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoilene_in_neok
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agosoonergrandmom
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agosoonergrandmom
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoilene_in_neok
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoMacmex
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agosoonergrandmom
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoMacmex
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agosoonergrandmom
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agosoonergrandmom
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agogldno1
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoMacmex
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agofestus47
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agookie22
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoMacmex
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agogldno1
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoMacmex
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agogldno1
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoMacmex
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoilene_in_neok
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoMacmex
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoilene_in_neok
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoMacmex
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoMacmex
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agomjandkids
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoMacmex
12 years agolast modified: 9 years agoMacmex
11 years agolast modified: 9 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
11 years agolast modified: 9 years agochickencoupe
9 years agolast modified: 9 years agochickencoupe
9 years agolast modified: 9 years agoMacmex
9 years agolast modified: 9 years agochickencoupe
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