Growing pumpkins

Bridgette Macilwaine
Dec 4, 2021
2 min read

Pumpkins are an amazing vegetable for a variety of creative and culinary uses. Growing them can be easy fun - there are a few simple tips to keep in mind to ensure your pumpkin plants grow their best!

Working with the Community Garden we were planning on growing pumpkins for the year which could also then be used later in garden cooking classes. The issue with growing vegetables from seed up at the Community allotment is that there is a constant overload of slugs which are more than happy to eat any small seedling trying to grow.

So I started off growing a few pumpkin varieties at home, sowed the seeds in April and kept them in a warm area, where I could care for them until they were big and strong enough to bring to the Community garden.

🌱 Fun fact:

The word 'pumpkin' comes from the Greek word, pepon, which means a “large melon."

Once the pumpkin babies were string enough, they were popped into a crate, into the car and off to the garden.

When planting pumpkins, these a few handy tips:

dig a large hole, 3 times the size that the pumpkin seedling
place pumpkins about 1.2m apart
plant the pumpkin in the middle at the bottom, so when watered, the hole can fill with water, then seep into the ground around the pumpkin as they get very thirsty producing all those huge pumpkins
use some kind of marker - here we used a stick with a ball on top to indicate the centre of the plant, because as they grow and spread, it can be quite hard to locate the centre of the plant when wanting to water it

As they grow you can gently direct the plant in the correct direction if they start to grow over the path, but be gentle, because if you pull to hard or too quickly the stem can snap quite easily. They are then quite happy to be left on their own with regular watering, and you can harvest the pumpkins when and as you need to.

For us they were a great community garden addition, because we were able to harvest a few pumpkins in an afternoon educational, cooking session with our members, cook outdoors and enjoy a delicious meal together.