Rick's Giant Pumpkin Growing Tips & Notes To Self:

-To avoid wind snap-offs, keep the vine as close to the ground as possible. Check DAILY. Pin down with bamboo gardening sticks X, or U shaped clothes hangar with aquarium tubing over it for cushioning.

-Bury all the vines, up to and including leaf as big as your hand. Check DAILY for new stuff to bury.

-On average, the female blossoms will start to open 9 days after the first male opens.

-Squash Vine Borer eggs will hatch in 3-6 days at 90 degrees, 5-10 days if low 80s. Then 1-2 days for the larvae to get into the plant.

-Carl G. fertilized every 2 days w/15-30-15 with double strength. viz., fertilize more often.

-Mid August- powdery mildew starts. Keep an eye on Lilac leaves- they get it first. The key is to start spraying mildew preventative BEFORE you can see it on the leaves.

More on powdery mildew:
Nothing will actually *kill* powdery mildew once you've got it. Daconil is probably the best, and
it is more of a mildew "preventer" than a killer. The powdery mildew is spores, like mold. It
is there way before you actually see anything. It starts out as yellowed spots on the leaves
and once you see the white powdery stuff, the mildew is well entrenched- "blooming", releasing
more spores. The best thing you can do is keep up with spraying and prevent it before it gets
that bad on the pumpkin plants. Since the mildew is spores, it's actually *everywhere*- on the
tops AND bottoms of the leaves, on the stems.
Get some concentrated Daconil. You'll need a garden pump-pressure-sprayer, and mix the Daconil
concentrate
with water according to directions on the bottle. For (let's say) two big plants, you won't
need more than half to one gallon of mix. You won't be able to store unused mix in the sprayer
because the Daconil settles out into mud on the bottom, and you need to
discard what you don't use. You want to mist and wet the tops and bottoms and stems of all leaves.
Spray the vine too if you want, but it's mainly the leaves that suffer because they're so thin.
The mildew won't quickly kill a whole plant, but will gradually kill several leaves a day- and
this adds up over time. I've had years where unchecked mildew shortened the life of my plant by
2-3 weeks- I had healthy pumpkins on a 25' long vine with only a dozen leaves left while my
neighbor had a plant with hundreds of green leaves left feeding his fruit. The mildew won't
kill the pumpkin fruit itself, but by hurting the plant, it makes the pumpkin growth
slow way down. Don't bother spraying the lilacs; the spores are everywhere in the air anyway,
and you're just interested in preventing them from gaining foothold on your pumpkin plants.
How often to spray? If the bottle has no guidance, probably every week to every couple of weeks
would be ok unless it rains. If you spray and it rains buckets the next day you can bet it
washed off and you will want to reapply lightly once things to dry out to touch things up.
The best hint I can give is to really keep up with burying the vine. Each buried leaf base
will sprout a couple roots, turning the whole plant into a big nutrient sponge. Bury the vine
from the planting site up to the last leaf that's as big as your spread-out hand. With the
vine growing 10" or so a day, you'll likely have something to bury every day. As the plant
gets bigger, it will take (a lot) more of your time, but this is the #1 key to getting a
really big fruit. Also, trim off the tertiary vines (small vines growing off the secondaries);
they just sap energy that should be going to the fruit. Experienced growers don't even heavily
fertilize nowadays, they just have learned really excellent gardening practices.

-Split stem- control with metal hose clamp cushioned with rubber innertube.

-Flat vine- slit in two using a sharp knife. Repeat if needed. Each part will continue to grow normally.

-Needs More Water, esp. during fruit set.

-Atlantic Giants have to pollinate in temps. under 90 degrees. The plant grows like this: Female flowers appear after 60-80 days. Pumpkins are full grown 60-70 days after the female flower is fertilized.

-Don't let up on weeding the garden... I let it go for about 2 weeks, and the crab grass invaded and got a solid foothold. The roots were deep. It took me an hour and a half of real hard work to straighten out my tiny 350 sq ft patch.

-Pay attention to the now fast-growing vines on a daily basis; if they get to growing "up" too much, gently train/hold them down to grow along the ground. If you just let them go, they'll get too heavy after 5 feet in the air, and snap in half. (The main vine on my best plant snapped off right about pollination time- 1st week in July!)

-The vines seem to grow "up" more readily if there's stuff (weeds) for it to "hang on to", so keep the ground around a growing vine clear, including clear of other plants/vines. Keeping the ground raked flat might also help it to stay along the ground. It's easy to train the plant to grow up a narrow garden, but tougher to keep the vines down when there's so many nearby leaves to climb up on.

-There are (were?) some Ziploc "vegetable storage" bags that work nicely for protecting tomorrow's flowers from the bees. They are perforated with tiny holes for air ventilation.

-BURY THE VINES MORE. I only buried about 1/3 the vines and I still grew 525+ lbs of pumpkin on one plant.

-Cull some off. Being my first year, I wanted to wind up at Halloween with SOMETHING from my garden after all this work, so I never culled anything. I was afraid of getting rot or splits, but any misfortune I had I seemed to be able to handle after reading Langevin's book, plus advice from the list. All the pumpkins I set grew to maturity.

-Fertilize more. I'm not sure how much more-, it's tough to get information on this as every grower seems to do it drastically different from another, but last year, I simply followed the Miracle Gro instructions for both strength and frequency. I think I can certainly up the frequency to more than once every 2 weeks.

-If you have a unchangeable-size garden, set aside a lot of extra dirt at the START of the season to bury vines with. Once the plant gets established, you literally won't be able to scrape up a bucket of dirt off the surface without hitting small white pumpkin vine roots; they're everywhere, porpoising up and back down into the ground. I added perhaps 25 40-pound bags of composted manure to my small garden, and I don't know where it all went to; I had no dirt to spare! Just lately on the list, I've heard of "trenching"- digging a trench for the vine to grow into, then covering it. I wish I'd thought of that last year! That's where I could've gotten the dirt from.

-Keep up on the vine-burying as the vines grow!! Before you know it, that thin secondary you didn't take the time to bury will be 16' long, with 2' leaves and flip itself over with the next wind, splitting the vine. Burying the vines helps to protect the plant from wind damage by anchoring at every leaf junction. This is probably the best tip here- note that top-weight growers are hardly using any fertilizer these days- it's mainly good gardening practices.

-rabbits can easily get through 2" hole chain-link fence. It doesn't look like they'd fit, but I guess they're all fluff, and they do. They love to munch female flowers a day or two before they are to open. I had to use chicken wire around the whole garden.

-While not a huge problem for me, I did get cucumber beetles and squash vine borers despite nobody else growing pumpkins for miles around... they flew very far to find my 2 plants. For control I sprayed with liquid Sevin, and watched the vines carefully for the borer grubs. I had about 3-4 enter the vines, and with experience actually managed to dig one out. They didn't do any real damage, but I think I was lucky. I need to spray more; I think I only sprayed for bugs twice all season. But you can wait until you start to see them before spraying. I'm thinking- no sense poisoning the yard if I don't have to.

-My biggest problem: mildew. By the end of September, I had very few leaves left due to them being killed by mildew. Contrary to what other list members have stated, I found that once started, NOTHING would kill the mildew, even Clorox. And Captan, if you read the label carefully, is a mildew PREVENTER, not a mildew-icide (like I thought it was). There IS no mildew-icide for plants that I could find. This coming season, I need to use Captan from about mid-season to the end to PREVENT the formation of mildew in the first place.

-I and some others have had good success using a hard, stiff styrofoam called "blue board", used for house insulation. Available at a big hardware store near you. You can cut it up into smaller pieces, and add them under as the pumpkin gets bigger. I used it solely because I have moles and I didn't want them to dig up and into the pumpkin. Seemed to work. It's waterproof, and flat- the water rolls off, keeping the pumpkin dry.

-SVB eggs are layed singly by the moth, not in masses. You will find the borers singley.

-I found a ton of yellow wet-sawdust frass INSIDE the stem (there was hardly any outside), so he'd been eating quite a while. I also was wondering just where to find the grub, being that the stem is hollow, maybe he'd move inside it. It turns out he apparently stays in the wall of the stem. I found mine just inside the inner wall. He was white, about 1/2" long, maybe 1/8" thick, with a black head or eyes (didn't look TOO close!).

-He was near the *downward* side of the 4" wound on the leaf stem, at the very tip of the visually-damaged area. This makes sense; he was heading "upstream" toward the vine. When I find another wound, I'll check the "upstream" end of the damage first; if on a vine, I'll check the end of the damage closest to the stump.