deadlypeanutboy

I'm not sure about your neck of the woods, but here in Arkansas it has been extremely hot; all this week we have had heat indexes of 100-110 degrees! The heat, however, has not stopped the patch, and things have been growing by leaps and bounds...for the most part.

First, the good news:




The pumpkins are still growing like mad! This is a mound of two Howden Biggie pumpkin vines, taken on 6/21/10. For those of you keeping up, this is just 3 weeks after we planted the seeds, and they are already starting to run. Up until a few days ago, the stalks were so large that the pumpkin plants were holding themselves upright without touching the ground. I guess they finally got heavy enough to fall down the mound and start their trek across my yard.






As you can see, the Howden Biggies grow some really huge vines and tendrils that start grabbing hold onto anything they can find. This will include your other garden plants if you are not careful (last year, we had turban squash trying to grow up our tomato cages). These guys are going to take up way too much space.






This is our hill of Musque de Provence. I included them here just to show off their pretty leaves. They don't get as huge as the Howden Biggies, but the plants are much prettier, and the resulting fruit make for really neat displays.




Now, the bad news:

We have had our first pumpkin casualty. I was hoping to avoid these this year, but something has killed one of my Jarrahdale pumpkin vines. I'm not sure what happened. On Thursday (6/17) I gave them a thorough watering and then left town until Sunday afternoon. When I went out in the garden to check things, this is what I found:




Last year we had similar problems with spontaneous wilting of whole plants, but I thought that was mainly due to plants being choked out by over-crowding. Usually we found squash bugs on the plants after they began to wilt, but rarely did we see them before they grew weak. I am assuming that the bugs are to blame, and I am planning a rather savage chemical warfare campaign to stop the carnage before anything else dies. The worst part is that I had just thinned that mound a few days previous, so now I only have one Jarrahdale plant left. I sure hope it survives and produces at least one good pumpkin.


Again, if any of you reading this are experienced pumpkin growers, PLEASE leave comments. I would love to know what I am doing wrong or what I could do better. Thanks for your help!!