The weather has warmed up a bit and the danger of frost is gone here in Western Washington, so now is the perfect time to plant pumpkin seeds. The Girl Who Thinks She’s a Bird is planning on having a harvest party this fall with her peeps. So this year we have dedicated a rather large area {maybe 50 feet by 20 feet?} to growing pumpkins. Lots and lots of pumpkins.
If you have never grown pumpkins in your backyard before, I want to encourage you to give it a try this year. Especially if you have little ones. Not only are pumpkins super easy to grow, but kids love watching the pumpkins get bigger and bigger with every passing day. Your children might even surprise you and not only want to water their pumpkin plants, but the entire garden as well. Trust me, paying $1.99 for a packet of seeds now, is totally worth it. Especially if it relieves you of watering duties for the summer.
When it comes to planting pumpkins, I think the key to having a well rounded pumpkin patch is variety. If you can grow 2 – 3 different kinds of pumpkins, that’s great. Have room for more? Even better.
Once you have your seed packets, you’ll need to find a sunny location with good soil to grow your pumpkins. Simply mound up the surrounding dirt into little hills and plant 3 seeds, about 1 inch deep per hill. Most seed packets recommend planting hills about 4 to 6 feet apart, but I’ve always planted my hills about 3 feet in all directions and have never had a problem with crowding.
As soon as I plant the pumpkin seeds, I place a plant marker right next to where I planted so I know where to water until the pumpkin seedlings starts to emerge. Once the pumpkins pop through the soil, I look for the healthiest plant and then clip the the other two seedlings with scissors.
This year we are growing 12 different varieties of pumpkins. Some are for size, some for color and some of the pumpkins are hard to find heirlooms we just thought looked kind of cool.
Here is a list of the seeds we planted this year:
- Long Island Cheese
- Cornfield
- Chersonskaya
- Sugar Pie
- French Musquee de Provence {Cinderella pumpkin}
- Jarrahdale
- Red Warty Thing
- Lumina
- Big Max
- Peanut {Amazon sells this}
- Dill’s Atlantic Giant {Amazon sells this}
- Sweet Meat {technically a winter squash}
Do you have a favorite pumpkin you grow every year? Have you ever tried growing a really giant pumpkin? I think our record for a single pumpkin is around 23 pounds, but I’d sure like to be able to grow one over one hundred pounds this year… How cool would that be?
To learn more about growing pumpkins, squash and gourds, check out The Compleat Squash
darlene says
The sweet meat is the best to can. It is what Libbys uses in their canned pumpkin. I can it in quart jars. One of my favorite recipes, and one good way to get fiber into your kids, is to make “cupcakes” with it.
One box of any flavor cake mix (I like chocolate or spice) and one jar of canned pumpkin drained. That’s it. No other ingredients. It makes 12 “cupcakes”. Each one has: 181 calories, 3.5g of fat, 2g of protein, 37g of carbs and 2g of fiber. They are super moist and delicious and no one is the wiser 🙂
Also fun, when the pumpkins are small, have the kids write their names or draw a few designs on them with a pencil. As the pumpkins grow, the names/designs will stay on as the pumpkin developes scar tissue where they wrote/drew (not too deep though or they can develope disease inside of the squash and rot).
Mavis says
Thank you Darlene. I had no idea sweet meat was the best! 🙂
Dawn says
We love that at our house too! We make it with spice or carrot and make it in a loaf pan, chill and serve with cool whip! YUM!
darlene says
Ooh! Good idea! I am going to do that tomorrow, thanks!
Andrea says
We have one lone pumpkin plant this year. We started some from seeds ourselves last year but they caught some kind of disease so we pulled them up before they finished. I am hoping that we get one or two pumpkins from our one plant this year.