Pumpkins?

[luellajean]

Has anyone ever grown pumpkins? I'm wanting to grow a little pumpkin patch this year so I can have my own home grown pumpkins to use for my annual pumkin carving party. I live in Texas, in case that makes a difference!

Luella

[stir it up]

hi Luella, yes we have grown pumpkins in quite a few different varieties.

One thing you might like to check into, is a variety that has hull-less seeds. So you get the smaller green seeds that are ready to eat like pepitas, instead of the big oversized white ones with the hard hulls that are unpleasant to eat. If you're going to have a lot of them and they're for carving, it's nice to enjoy the seeds. We grew one called Kakai, the pumpkins were ok for flavor, not amazing, but the seeds were great. They are a little trickier to germinate the seeds, they can rot in dirt, so you have better germination if you start them between moist paper towels, then plant carefully once they've begun to sprout. That's the only picky part of them, otherwise they grow out like any pumpkins.

Pumpkins like lots of richness in the soil, compost, well-composted manure, whatever you can get your hands on.

[KYHeirloomer]

Is your concern only carving?

As a general rule, good carving pumpkins do not make good table pumpkins, because they tend to be less sweet, and are stringy.

If you let me know more specifics I can better make recommendations.

[love2bake]

Don't know if you have a deer problem but they loved my patch and before we got a fence up, they ate everything.

I ordered the seeds from the net, got a very small pumpkin for pie making. It had the word "sweet" in the title.