Pumpkin Wrap Up

Image via WikipediaNow that the pumpkin season is well and truly over, I wanted to make a few notes on my first foray into pumpkin growing.

General Notes

• Pumpkins are not hard plants to grow. They're a GREAT plant to try for the novice gardener. I didn't find they took much effort or expertise to grow.
• Pumpkins are resilient. We had a heat wave which really knocked the pumpkin vines badly but they made a comeback as soon as the weather eased a little. They do NOT however, like frost (which is understandable given they're a summer/autumn plant).
  
• Pumpkins will take over the whole garden and half the play area if you let them - they need LOTS of space. Next year I'm going to grow them OUTSIDE of our back yard area where they can go nuts as far as space is concerned.

Butternut Pumpkins

• I couldn't believe how SWEET our homegrown butternut pumpkins were. They taste NOTHING like what I've ever bought in the shop. Last night my youngest said "thanks for growing pumpkins mummy". Isn't that cute? The kids certainly liked the homegrown version better than the shop bought version.
• From 2 plants we ended up with 10 Butternuts. I was really happy with that result.
• Grew from seed with no problems.
  

Jap Pumpkins

• From 2 plants (I started with 6 but only 2 survived) we grew 6 Jap Pumpkins despite the plants covering a MUCH larger area than the butternut pumpkin plants.
  
• These were later flowering than the butternuts and I don't think there were as many bugs around to help with pollination. We had quite a few that didn't ever develop into pumpkins. I deliberately didn't try to manually pollinate too much as I wanted to see what "nature" would do on it's own.
• We haven't cut into any of the Jap's yet as we've been busy consuming butternuts so I can't comment on the flavour.

Conclusions

I'm really happy with my pumpkin growing efforts, particularly for a first try. Since Jap and Butternut are our favourite pumpkins, I will stick with those two varieties. I particularly liked that they fruited about 3 months apart.

While we grew more butternuts in number, the Jap's were larger and heavier so for the same number of plants, the Jap would still have given us MORE in terms of kg.

The few things I'd like to do differently are:

1. Position. Move them outside the yard (to under our fruit trees that aren't planted yet is the plan).
2. Try Jap from seed. The butternuts grew from seed no problems. The Jap were seedlings. I'd like to try growing them from seed as well.
3. Manual Pollinating. To get a better crop, I'm going to try manual pollinating next year and see how that goes.

Hopefully our pumpkins will store well and will see us through a good portion of the rest of the year. My ultimate goal will be to NEVER buy pumpkin again. In babysteps of course. :)