Since I have committed to growing these pumpkins, I decided to do a little research on how to do it right.
1. Amend the soil - check.
2. Pick your variety - too late.
3. Plant seedlings - planted themselves.
4. Water - All the time
5. Fertilize with nitrogen during vine growth, phosphorus during fruit set, and potassium during fruit growth. Mine are at the fruit set stage, so bone meal will do the trick.
Here is where it gets weird. Apparently, there are a bunch of crazy people who grow pumpkins competitively. They want you to pull all but one baby pumpkin off the vine. Then they want you to force the vine to grow perpendicular to the pumpkin. There was also a pretty complicated set of instructions on pruning pumpkin vines. In order to insure pumpkin bloodlines, these prized pumpkins must practice birth control by putting baggies over the female blooms. The female blooms must then be hand pollinated. No bees allowed, hmmm.
Here is another a few days younger.
Here is an itty bitty baby.
I counted about eight pumpkins on two vines. Should I cull a few of them or let them all live?
