#pumpkinsubmissions

[pumpkin-patch]

Hello!  Thanks for the lovely blog :)  This year I stuck 4 little mounds of sugar pie seeds into a neglected community garden spot &  ignored them completely. I picked these guys yesterday! Gonna get them turned into soup.

Firstly I apologize for appearing to have ignored your very nice submission for so long, and secondly thank you very much, and your pumpkins are beautiful!! I bet they made great soup and their vines made the garden look so pretty!

[pumpkin-patch]

I have not grown Kaikai but I have purchased a few. The seeds are INCREDIBLY delicious not like store pepitas at all. They do in fact look EXACTLY like that.

The rind is very very VERY tough. Definitely not for carving. Which of course did not stop me.

I saved seeds from one and tried to grow it myself but it didn't work out - someone must have cross pollinated at some point because the offspring was plain orange and the seeds had seed coats. Total bust. But I would totally try again with professional seeds.

I roasted the seeds in the oven and rolled them in butter and they were stupidly delicious. If you make this work I'll come over and eat any seeds you don't want

Oooh in that case I'm impressed! I appreciate the review, I didn't realize the rind was that tough so I guess I won't be risking an ER trip trying to carve one. Sounds like more of a "bludgeon it on my driveway til it cracks in half" type guy. I'm sorry your saved seeds didn't work out! If these grow okay for me and I get some seed I'm 100% sure about, I'll send you some lol!

[pumpkin-patch]

I harvested my first pumpkin today! This was supposed to be an acorn squash...

He's beautiful!! I love that shape and I see the last traces of an interesting ripening pattern going on there.

[pumpkin-patch]

My blue hubbard squash looks like this. I thought it was from heat and dryness do I watered it heavily, and then we had a storm last night, and it STILL looks like this. The whole vine is limp.

I took a picture of the base in case you can see something wrong that's not obvious to me.

Any thoughts on what has happened or how I can keep it alive long enough to harvest the two fruits on it?

This is also the vine that has had all the squash bugs, but so far I've gotten all the clutches before they hatch, and I know what squash bug damage looks like and it's not this. Halp??

Tough to say! I don't really see anything from here, but you might really get in there close by the stem and make sure you don't see any hints of a vine borer? But: does it stay wilted 24/ 7? The leaves naturally wilt during the day when it's hot, that's business as usual. Have you gone out to check really early in the morning (before the sun has hit them) to see if they've bounced back? Also how far along are your fruits?

[pumpkin-patch]

Do you have any idea what cultivar this is?

I swear I've seen this before, I got one from a farm maybe 5 years ago? It's perfectly smooth and white with mottled blue coloration and striation. My instinct is it's a C. maxima based on the lack of ridges. I poked around online and maybe it's Casper? But the pictures don't really match?

This one's pretty small but the one I got from the farm was decently hefty, 2x the size, perhaps more? Largish jack-o-lantern size I would say.

Cotton Candy may also be a possibility? In that those are seeds I do in fact own? But this grew with no prompting in a friend's garden and she's never seen anything like it before in her life...

Ooo. That stem says maxima for sure. But I'm not sure off the top of my head. To the archives! IDing white pumpkins is so hard because I swear a lot of catalogs use pictures of all white pumpkins interchangeably, they'll just slap on absolutely whatever picture for whatever variety 🙄 Cotton Candy seems to be a pepo, so I'm gonna say probably not that. Casper is consistently listed as a pepo and then the picture they all put, and it's always the same one, I swear has a maxima stem. I feel like I trust the labels more than the photos but I'm honestly not sure. The blue tinge is something I understand can happen to a lot of officially white pumpkins in general - if you leave them in the field a bit too long, what was originally pure white will start to lean towards blue or yellow. So it could be that this is one we'll never see marketed as blueish. Best other possibility I can find is Lumina (which I'm actually growing for the first time now so I'll soon have better intel 🤞) and as a matter of fact I see one listing that warns they have blue tendencies when stressed.

[pumpkin-patch]

My lone pumpkin I've managed to grow this year. I'm not sure exactly when I should harvest it. It's a long island cheese pumpkin. Does she look ready to harvest to you?

She looks great!! In terms of "will it survive" I think it's generally fine to harvest as soon as the color changes, and that looks pretty Long Island Cheesy to me. If you've grown it to eat, and/or you're looking to save the seeds inside (to grow), it may benefit from a longer stay on the vine to give sugars and seeds more time to develop. In my garden I consider about a week past full color ripeness to be enough.

[pumpkin-patch]

Little Chungus has made Chunglings!

Chungling the First

and Chungling the Second. It's put out dozens if not hundreds of buds and flowers at this point but these are the only two that set (that I've been able to find!) They seem to be bottle gourds and they seem to grow very very slowly. Unlike the rest of Little Chungus.

...this is after his haircut this afternoon. I swear this thing grows a foot a day.

Oh my gosh, that got huge. But that's a fun problem to have! I'm eager to see what those babies grow up to look like

[pumpkin-patch]

Harvested Katisha today!

She's bigger than Koko (appropriate) but not quite as stunningly perfect

Bonus porch gourd

Excuse you, she is stunningly perfect! They look great