Here I am with all 4 fruit out front. Can you tell which two fruit are from the same plant? :-)
As most giant pumpkin weighoffs are the first weekend in October, the
time to germinate seeds (indoors) for me is around the 3rd week in April. This year, I germinated on April 29-30th. I grew
seeds from:
-986* Hester 00 (very green "squash")
-850.5 Hester 99
-983.6 Ciliberto 00 (won the PA weighoff)
-789 Zunino 00
The garden is in the sunniest spot in my yard, and it gets full sun from about 9am-7:30pm. This year I tilled in 1,600 pounds of composted cow manure- 40 forty-pound bags! On 5/19 I planted all 4 plants outside- it was a mistake to keep them in the pots so long, but I had no opportunity to put them out earlier. I missed some early season extra-warm weather. When I put them out, we went into a long spell of cool weather.
The self-pollinated 986 squash seed amazed me by throwing yellow fruit (not green)! It wound up as the deepest orange pumpkin I've ever grown, seen on the far right in the photo above. Other growers had the same result with this seed.
The 850.5 grew nicely, but started to double vine about 6' out. Rather than rip out the plant, I slit the vine's growing tip with a knife, and one half developed normally, and the other half continued to replicate (I terminated that half). I'm glad I didn't cull the plant as it produced my biggest fruit, plus another nice one.
The Ciliberto seedling was twice the size of the other three seedlings, just amazing. The plant grew very nice, but in the end the fruit was not the largest, I think because that end of the garden was overhung by a walnut tree.
The Zunino was by far the largest AG seed I've ever seen, but I later culled the plant because it started to "flat vine" about 4' out. It did manage to start one fruit, but it split open at about cantaloupe size.
I was a little disappointed that I didn't come close to my personal best of 411 from last year. In retrospect, I believe it's because I didn't pay enough attention to the plants- I didn't fertilize heavy enough early on, I didn't set the plants in the garden early enough. There were a couple of 3 week stretches in May/June where I didn't fertilize at all. I also didn't take enough pictures to show my progress throughout the season! :-) Regardless of the size, the genetics of the resulting seeds are quite good. I saved seeds from the 194 pounder (850.5 f x 983.6 m), and the 128 pounder (986* f x 983.6 m).
Here's what they looked like lit up:
The Carrot Story: In addition to the pumpkins, I dog-legged a new vegetable garden off one end of the patch. We planted greenhouse plants from cukes, strawberries, eggplant, tomato, and some carrots from seed. Last year, our carrots were unusable midgets because (I later found out) they have a very long growing season. So this year, I made sure that I planted the seeds nice and early- in May, and it resulted in nice, normal, usable-sized carrots. We'd been picking a few every now & then for us or the pets, as we needed them. No sense picking the whole bunch at once and having them sit in the ` fridge to get old. On Nov. 17th, the kids asked if they could go out to the garden to pick (pull up) a carrot for our guinea pig . "Sure, but just one." Well, from the window, I was watching the kids out in the yard. Most of the carrots are in the vegetable garden. But one carrot seed blew into the giant pumpkin patch, and when I noticed it growing, I just let it grow there undisturbed. The kids had been curious about this one lone plant all season, but I'd encouraged them to leave it alone. Well, the kids went to pull this particular one out by the greens, and they couldn't budge it. So they got a trowel, but they STILL had trouble. I'm watching all of this through the window, and I'm thinking that they're just fooling around- they were working industriously, and laughing. Next thing I know, I see them bring around a man-sized shovel from the garage, jumping on it repeatedly to dig way down. I'm wondering why they're digging holes in the garden, but decide they look like they're having lots of fun, so ok. All of a sudden, they grab the carrot, pull it out, and their faces light up as they scream OH--MY--GOSH!!, and they came running in the house to show me the carrot- it was 10" long and **2.5 inches** in diameter!! It's the biggest carrot I've ever seen, weighing 15.2 ounces- nearly a pound for ONE carrot! I guess it fully utilized the loose soil and fertilizer I pumped on the pumpkins!
Look, it's SuperDog!!
Hey, I wanna grow some of Rick's free seeds!