I guess alot depends on what your soil type is. If your digging a hole into primarily clay soil, you risk creating a "bathtub" effect. What happens here is that water runs into the path of least resistance (the nice compost hole) and then fills up that hole because it cannot drain properly through the clay surrounding it. The roots will be suffering if you get too much water. If it is dry, this won't be as much of a problem. You will need to ammend that compost to provide the necessary nutrients. Compost by itself will not have sufficient nutrient value for the large vines and you cannot count on much nutrient value in the ground surrounding it if it has been grass for more than a few years. Another challenge will be cutting the grass under the vines. Unless you have grown pumpkins before, you might be in for a bit of a shock as to how big they get. You can easily expect a well grown pumpkin vine to take up a circle of 15 feet in diameter quite easily. Unless you are cutting the vines with the lawnmower (then what is the point of growing them in the first place?) you are going to have a wild patch of prickly vines, leaves, flowers, fruit, weeds and grass. Pumpkin patches are not "tidy and attractive" unless you heavily, heavily mulch the area. It doesn't bother me, but my pumpkins grow in the garden out back. You may not really like how it looks on the lawn. If you still decide you want to do this, then I would think 1 plant per hole will be the best. There will be intense competition for water with the thick layer of turf, so spacing in a dry garden environment for pumpkins is usually 6 feet between hills. "But I will water the hole" you say "so I won't matter". This will provide the base with moisture yes, but the root system of the pumpkin is absolutely enormous. If it is extending into the surrounding ground, and the surrounding ground is topped with an established, matted turf, that ground under the turf will be quite dry. The roots will need to wander long and far looking for sufficient water and nutrients. When deciding where to plant pumpkings, just remember the old saying: where do you let a 500lb gorilla sit? Anywhere he wants to. The same applies for pumpkins: you can't just plop them anywhere and expect them to cooperate. Hope this helps, Michael

trev is right. the problem is the variety that your growing. they are water and nutrient hogs. when the vines start to take off they will put on 6 inches a day, (in perfect conditions). one of those plants can drink 10 gals of water a day. or more.

jadegarden, I hope you didn't just jinx yourself by saying that. Whenever I say that a certain pest hasn't shown up, it always seems to show up almost immediately, as if it wants to prove me wrong. About 1 year out of 5, I don't have SVBs or squash bugs show up at all. Last year was one of those years for me, Maybe this year is one of those years for you, as far as the pickle worms go. We'd like to have the same kind of crystal ball for freezes here. Our winters are trending warmer as well, but we had one cold spell back in January that was very cold for a few days. I'm in zone 7b and we dropped to 4 degrees. Luckily, it didn't last long, and before long we were hitting highs in the 70s, 80s and 90s, which is not normal in Oklahoma in January so we understand exactly what you're saying about the trend towards warmer winters. I'm glad you've been enjoying reading here, now that we know you are here, you do realize we expect to see you speaking with us regularly. I expect you have much to add to our discussions even if you think you don't. Once you've joined the family here, we worry if you aren't showing up and talking, so.....I hope you'll continue talking with us. I suspect that except for the timing of planting, we probably have a lot in common with regard to gardening in difficult climates. When you have drought conditions occurring, the low humidity follows as whatever moisture is in the ground evaporates and whatever moisture is in the plants transpires with no rain falling to replace it. During our worst drought periods, whether in winter or summer, it is not unheard of, especially in western OK, to have the RH drop into the single digits. When it is that dry, is is scary. I have my own relative humidity detection device---my skin. Whenever the humidity gets down to about 18%, my skin feels like it is cracking. Wildfires become much more likely to start once the humidity drops to around 30%, and if it drops down to 15%, fires start ridiculously easily---even from a vehicle dragging a chain, or from a tire blowout on a road that sends pieces of hot rubber into a field or along the side of the road, catching fire whever that piece of tire lands. When we get paged out for multiple fires along the interstate all at the same time, it almost always is a dragging chain, a blown-out tire, or something similar. Unless it is arson. We also get plenty of fires started by people burning something they shouldn't be burning or burning while the wind it too high or the humidity too low, etc. Our wildfire season ended about a month ago when the rain showed up and fell in nice amounts over a period of days. It was quite a relief. Hopefully y'all will catch a break and get some rain too and that will relieve the fire danger somewhat. It is awful that it is so bad there now and you haven't even started your official fire season yet. (Our fire seasons don't follow the rules ever and start very early some years.) I cannot imagine Florida without green grass, and I know how scary it is when everything turns brown. I hope you can save your plants. It is tough to be stuck between a rock and a hard place when water costs so much and water restrictions may be in place, compounding the issue, and then rain just stubbornly refuses to fall. I agree that snakes, when aggressive, are incredibly dangerous and cannot be tolerated in the yard. After water moccasins moved into our lily pond during the horrendous drought of 2011-2014 dried up all our ponds and creeks, we gave up, drained the water, and filled in the pond. Because the pond sat just outside our back door, alongside a pathway that runs from our house to our detached garage, there was no way we could keep that lily pond, but I really miss it. If you killed one water moccasin, another one moved in, and they are very aggressive. I miss the lily pond, but I don't miss looking down into the water and seeing that cottonmouth looking at me, mouth open, in a menacing way. Copperheads are not too bad overall, all things considered. They'd rather not bite you, and they'll slither away if there's a way for them to do that. If cornered or surprised, they certainly will bite. Their venom, assuming a person is not allergic, is not nearly as bad as that of other snakes, like rattlesnakes, for example. Our next door neighbors have had two people bitten by copperheads at their place, about 10 years apart, but we haven't had that happen here yet. We have had lots of close calls. The timber rattlers worry me more. For some reason, they like to come out of the neighbor's cow pasture (which has a woodland in the center of it), slither across about 8' feet of grass that we keep mowed very short, cross our gravel driveway and enter the fenced veggie garden through the gate. I constantly run into them at the gate from roughly June through August. We have done some work to our gate, replacing the gate itself with a Victorian style screen door with a firm latch. Tim replaced the bottom couple of feet of screening with sturdy plywood, and then he built a wooden threshold across the bottom of the entry arbor so that the door can be closed tightly to keep snakes from slithering under the door. That seems to be keeping the larger timber rattlers out of the garden, but the smaller one come through the fence. My dream is not for world peace or a colony of explorers on Mars---my dream is just to have a snake-free garden. Is that too much to ask? I like the idea of a snake trap, but someone else would have to deal with that trap once a snake is in it because I'm not going to do it. Please be careful with all those creatures invading your yard. That is exactly how things go from bad to worse here when all the wildlife gets hot, tired and hungry. Of course they come to our cultivated yard and garden areas where they are more likely to find something (anything) to eat or drink. We always have lots of innocent, sweet, non-poisonous lizards, toads and frogs in the garden eating bugs and things all the time until the snakes get hungry. Once the snakes show up, all our pretty little toads and frogs disappear. I hate it. I hope you get a good harvest of Seminoles. That happened here in 2011. We didn't have any rain for a couple of months and the high temperatures were over 100 (often well over 100) for about 70 days straight. The Seminole plants just sort of sat there. Then, we had rain on at least two days (finally!) in August, and the plants went berserk, grew like mad and produced dozens of pumpkins, which I harvested in November and December. Since the Seminole rind is so tough, even when I missed some and didn't get them harvested before the first freeze, it didn't matter. When I did find them after the vines froze, I harvested them all and lined them up in the garage to cure. Most were still green but hadn't suffered any freeze damage. Over the next two or three months, they slowly turned their usuall buff color and were usable. They tasted perfectly fine. I never would have expected Seminole to rebound like that after that horrific drought (when even our native cacti died!) but it did. George, So, now I can say I know someone who did have to deal with pickle worms. That is good to know. If they ever show up here, you'll be our Oklahoma pickle worm expert, and Jade can advise us from Florida too. Just talking about pickle worms is making my skin crawl. They are ugly little critters. I hope they don't show up here since we didn't have a winter. Texas to our south didn't have a winter either. I believe their last freezing temperature was recorded January 8th, so the pickle worms, if they got an early start in the Gulf coast parts of Texas, could be on their way here already. I hope we aren't jinxing anyone by talking about them. Dawn

I have two set ups. Most of my plants are in 35 L Pots. Just under 9 gallons. I have plenty of physical space, but obviously I'm limited by the pots. I also have a small garden with 12 plants in it. They are a bit close but they have more then 2 feet between them. My oldest plants are only about two months since transplanted into pots and one is already over 6 feet tall and while it's got a lot of unripened fruit on it, I've not even harvested one yet. Point being, these plants are looking like they will be huge if I let them. Some of the young ones have leaves wider than the plant is tall (about a foot and a half). I'm supporting things with bamboo. I have two or three poles in each pot and am starting to lay posts in the garden. I've been pruning my older plants down to about 3 vines each but have been reading a lot about growing huge yields and it seems the recommendations are to let more vines develop for the bigger yields. But I'd think a pot can only support so much healthy fruit. I'm wondering what that amount is? I've got to make some decisions about how I'm going to let my younger plants grow and I was just wondering where that balance was and how many vines I could easily support with a pot that size or a garden where plants were only about 2 feet apart. I figured there was a limit. I'm growing over a dozen varieties such as Brandywines, Ox Hearts, Aunt Ruby's, Black Krim, Big Rainbow, Abraham Lincoln, Hill Billy, and so on. Thanks in advance for any advice you might have.