The Pumpkin growing and carving challenge 2015

It's just another thing I pull out of skips

 

This one is sitting on a 14" wide piece of expanded polystyrene. I'm going to be optimistic and swop it for a bigger piece.

 

Sometimes pumpkins can abort for no apparent reason, it has not happened to me yet but I have read about it. What I have done in past years is keep the largest and one other and removed the rest. I even then start removing any new flowers that appear. Eventually I remove the backup as well.

Steve...

 

Here's mine:

 

It's happened to me a few times, when the pumpkins have still been a shiny, pale, creamy yellow, never after they lose their shine and the skin starts to get a bit more colour, although never grown anything that starts green (like JWK's) other than smallish Halloween pumpkins,

Biggest now 45" circumference. Gave each plant over 30L of water each today in the hope this sunshine might get them shifting, all I need is a 1" increase in dia. per day and it'll be over 200lbs by 9th Sept! (data + spreadsheets are great for optimism).

 

I pulled and composted one plant last week leaving two and I went to the plot this morning intending to pull those. I only pulled one plant as the other now has a pumpkin growing on it, only tennis ball size at the moment...

Steve...

 

I've got this pumpkin, another about the same weight (different shape) on second plant, and two about 10" dia. on my third & biggest plant, the one on the main stem has caught up with the other on a secondary, so now it's most probably going to grow on OK I'll cut the one on the secondary and turn it into curried pumpkin soup, but around one month too late to be any good (the pumpkin left to grow, not the soup). The 1" increase in girth/day is rubbish, I've got marrows bigger than pumpkins this year.

 

Can you do an OTT measure to put a weight to it Scrungee? Girth or diameter don't mean anything to me.

Steve...

 

Less than 50lbs I'd guess, so less than my marrows. I don't have absolute faith in many weight estimating calcs, especially the end to end, side to side (down to ground) in cm and divide by 150 for marrows, I tend to work on surface area x weight per square inch measured from previous examples.

 

Here are my too they have actually started to put a fair bit of growth on both are a bit bigger than a football so far

 

OTT measurements taken this morning, largest is only about 52lbs, I've grown three marrows bigger than that this year.



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My third (& largest) plant was late in setting pumpkins and has 2 on it, first was on a secondary and then a second on the main stem that is growing fastest and has overtaken the first. I think it's now a bit late in the season to remove the smaller one in an attempt to get one bigger than on the other plants, so I'll leave both and the smallest will be turned upright and grown on as a Halloween pumpkin for a friend's child, I'm sure it will still be a monster to him.