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1 - It's Sunday, July 23. I've enlisted Maureen (Farmer Ben's wife) to help me sort out this Giant Pumpkin Patch. She is very good with plants and untangling this sort of mess. We will both have lots of questions about Giant Pumpkins after this, I'm sure. While we are weeding and untangling vines, we laugh that neither of us really knows what we are doing — the blind-leading-the-blind situation — but freeing the plants from the weeds certainly can't be hurting them. We'll have to read the archives of PumpkinNook.com to answer some of our questions: i.e. what to cut off and what to leave. |
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2 - Finding the crown, or main root, is one of the assignments Maureen is doing. Sounds simple, but with all the vines criss-crossing, it isn't always clear which vines go with which root. |
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3 - One of the pumpkin fruit (a baby pumpkin) is about 7 inches long. This one isn't the biggest, but it is about 4 feet from the main root, so has less chance of pulling itself out of the ground as it grows. |
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4 - This looks like one large pumpkin plant, but it turns out to be several. I'll finish the weeding here the next weekend or so. |
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5 - The leaves are in good shape. Large, good green color. The plants have all blossomed and several have large fruit (baby pumpkins) on them. |
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6 - I'm going to try to take a photo of each plant today. We are still not quite sure how many plants there are. I thought Ben planted 8 seeds, but there seem to be LOTS more Giant Pumpkin plants. We did pull 2 plants out today. They were undersized and too close to a big, healthy plant. |
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7 - We need some help understanding what is the "main" vine. How do we figure that? |
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8 - This plant looks a bit worse the wear for our weeding and untangling, but they are tough, hopefully they will straighten themselves out before next weekend. The red hat was what I carried PREEN in -- to spread around the newly weeded areas, and inhibit new weed growth. I'm hoping it won't affect the root growth. We also spread a small amount of 10-10-10 fertilizer around the main root. Didn't have quite enough for all, so went with the less is best theory. |
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9 - Here in the center you can spot the largest fruit on these plants. It's probably about 9 inches in diameter - but it's only about 2 feet from the main root. Should we cut? We didn't have the courage to do that today. |
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10 - Lots of blossoms, mostly male, still on the plants. I suppose we should cut them. I'm not sure about trimming of the secondary vines as yet. |
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11 - This is a rather small plant, but in a good space (not invading others) so we'll let it run. |
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12 - Stay tuned for next weekend. We'll be reading more at PumpkinNook.com
July 27, 2006 - I've been reading lots of information on the web this week, and I'm astounded by how much time people spend tending to their giant pumpkins. Wow! They deserve to have outrageously huge pumpkins. Not many grower (on the GiantPumpkins.com site) were from Maryland, but one from Mt. Airy was great fun to read. He spends SO much time on his soil, seeds, watering, pumpkins. Our largest fruit is about 6 inches in diameter - his is 300 pounds already! Wow! Shows what a difference that extra care makes.
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