Morning pumpkin check in
Good morning from the most sincere pumpkin patch in all of East Cobb, GA! Here’s a few ramblings and information I’ve learned about growing giant pumpkins recently:
It’s not unusual for pumpkins to grow up to 2 feet per day.
Once you have a female flower (just males so far) you will need to have “plant sex” aka hand pollination between the female flower and a male flower. 🫣 No, we will not start one of THOSE accounts for that particular event. This is a family friendly blog.
Once the pollination goes down (boom chicka waa-waa) and the pumpkin starts to develop, you watch it like a newborn baby. Bad storm? He’ll be out there holding a beach umbrella over it. (Seriously, he’ll cover it up)
Jon uses something called “pumpkin juice” to feed his plants every few days, more frequently if it rains a lot as the rain can wash nutrients away. (WHO KNEW) As the pumpkin grows he’ll feed even more frequently. People use all kinds of things to feed their pumpkin- milk, a mixture of something and molasses, and other stuff I forgot. (I tend to zone out when he really starts explaining)
We will have to water this thing like crazy. The Dawson 2,000 pound pumpkin was gaining about 60 pounds per day and a lot of this is water weight. Same Dawson 2K, same.
When he’s shooting off facts about pumpkins I like to ask him things for funsies like “What’s my phone number? How do you send an attachment on an email?”
We’re about to spend the night in the mountains and there’s a risk of storms today. He’s leaving our adult kids in charge and he’s more nervous about his pumpkin patch than he was the first time we left our kids with a babysitter.
I braved the onslaught of mosquitoes and measured the most promising pumpkin plants growth. It grew a little over a foot in 24 hours! The garden now has a designated tape measure, since this has become “my job".
We’ll check back in Sunday afternoon!
