deadlypeanutboy

Last year's adventure in pumpkin farming had some rather mixed results. Here is a picture of last year’s harvest:



At first glance, this looks like a pretty good haul. We were rather pleased with ourselves. Unfortunately, this picture is a bit deceiving:

For starters, this picture was taken in the middle of August. Summer was not yet over and we found ourselves knee deep in pumpkins that we could not leave on the vines because of massive wilting caused by pests and disease. We tried storing them in our garage, but many never made it to October. About a third, including most of the larger ones, got soft and rotted before they could be displayed.

Also, many of the pumpkins shown are misshapened and under ripe. Only the back row of pumpkins really got to any decent size. As mentioned before, much of our harvest had to be removed early because the plants were dieing back. Those that were not lost to rot were too small to carve.

After a little research, we realized that our fatal flaw was that we simply had too many pumpkins in too small a space. For starters, our patch consisted of mounds, 4 to a 20 ft row and each row only 6-8 ft apart. Then we started 3-4 plants per hill, intending to thin them out to 2 per hill. Unfortunately, we were so delighted that our little baby seedlings were growing that we neglected to thin them out. The results were rather surprising! Two or three weeks after planting, our little mounds looked something like this:



After a few more weeks of letting them grow as they pleased, we quickly filled our garden:



After a few more weeks, things got really out of hand. The resulting jungle (not too much of an exaggeration) was completely unmanageable and resulted in a large number of plants lost to over-crowding.



Many of the smaller plants were choked out by the larger ones. The dieing plants then became nurseries for mold and squash bugs. Plants that were healthy and producing fruit would begin wilt and then rot away in a matter of days. We salvaged as many of the pumpkins as we could, but many of these were too green to be able to handle storage. Over-crowding and a lack of pruning and management doomed our over-grown patch to disaster. These hard-taught lessons will not go ignored this year.