Your pumpkins look very healthy. Do you move the patch to a different part of the farm each year?
I grow some pumpkins, and agree you have to sparay them a lot. I sprayed 8X this year, which is the most ever, but the vines look good. I put on 60-70 gallons per acre at 150 psi with a boom sprayer. Although the crop is OK I can see it starting to decline a little each year, I think due to the fact that I am using a 2-year rotation, but that is all the land I have available.
Harold,
It's the first time anything has been grown on this spot, other than grass, in about 10 years. I put a lot of prep into the ground. I disked it three times. Starting in early March. Let the weeds come up, disk again, let the weeds come up, and then disk again. Lay off my rows with a Covington planter (I put 5-10-15 in the ground with the planter) and plant by hand. Abby's job is to drop the seeds. I then hoe the plants every few days to keep the moisture up. We thinned by hand leaving one plant to the heal.
I planted on June 15 this year, which was almost too late to allow the Atlantic Giants to reach their full size, but was about right on everything else.
To me the biggest thing to do with pumpkins is to get good ground coverage with your vines before they grow up with weeds or grass. I planted everything, but the Atlantic Giants, in 4' rows. The Giants go in 8' rows. When we thinned the pumpkins I then plowed them with the Farmall 140 and "layed them by" with 13-13-13. Within 3 days I had to go back and "lay them by" with 30-0-0. 7 days from thinning the ground was completely covered with vines. I could walk through the vines and they were almost waist deep on me and I'm 6'9" tall. You couldn't even see the pumpkins until the vines started to go down in late August.
The Atlantic Giants did grow up with grass, but the vines didn't cover the ground as well with 8' rows and 6' spacing between the vines.
I started dusting the plants with 7 Dust within a few days of them coming up. When they started to run I switch over and sprayed them with Manzate, Lannate, and Asona. That's what our county agent recommends. I sprayed them every 7-10 days, but if it came a heavy rain in between I would respray and adjust my 7-10 schedule. I only had 1/4 acre this year so I just sprayed them with a 15 gallon ATV sprayer. I would spray the vines until runoff.
Abby was really excited, because one of our Atlantic Giants won 1st place at the county fair. It weighed 123 pounds. We also won 1st and 2nd place with our Jack-B-Littles, and 3rd place with one of Jack-O-Lanterns. We received 2 blue, one red, and one yellow ribbon and a whopping $22.00 in prize money
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You might want to have a soil sample done. You may need to lime the ground or add some other nutrient.
I understand about only having a certain area to grow something. We have 30 acres total with my parents. Only about 6 acres of that is tillable. I have everything in pasture for the goats. So where did I plant the pumpkins. In the yard of course
. About 50' to the right of where the pictures were taken is our house. Of course this was a watermelon patch before we built our house here. I'm thinking of crossfencing the pasture to cut out about 1 acre to grow pumpkins next year. That way I can convert this little patch back into yard.
Chris
