Giant pumkpins? Yes, please!

     I have had an epiphany. I want to grow giant pumpkins. Y’all are going to go along on the journey! Well, assuming someone reads this. Mr. Hatfield had purchased some seeds from an Atlantic Giant pumpkin and he and his boys grew some last year. He has brought me a bag of seeds from a pumpkin they grew that was around 130-140 pounds. I’ve started them in the greenhouse today and hopefully they’ll germinate and we’ll be on our way to growing some ginormous pumpkins. The pumpkins pictured to the left were around 400lbs, by the way.

     So, apparently, what you have to do is let the vine get goin’ and wait until it has 6 to 8 baby pumpkins on it and measure the girth of each of them every day and remove all but the fastest growing one, so that it gets all the nutrients that the plant produces. By the end of the growing season, you should have a really huge pumpkin! There are however, obstacles to this. Squash bugs can decimate your vines, the plants require a lot of water and fertilizer because of their fast growth, and they can grow too quickly and bust open! They can even grow so large that they tear their own vine if there isn’t any slack in it! What you need to do is pick a pumpkin fairly close to the base of the plant and pull it back toward it a bit so that there’s a bend in the vine that will allow the pumpkin to grow without putting a kink in the vine or tearing the plant out of the ground.
     I am no campaigning for a PLANET SCD fundraiser of a pumpkin patch for next year. It’s too late to start it this year… wish me luck!
     I’ll keep you up to date with this year’s pumpkins!


Jessica Logan Watters, GCLP                     Horticulture Technician, Chattahoochee Technical College