Casebolt Clan's Journey to Mountain Living: GIANT PUMPKINS!!!! NOW WHAT?

Anyone who knows me, knows that I am obsessed with Halloween. Most of what I do is centered on the holiday. We even have a permanent Halloween room in our home. But we also equally love fall. When we started gardening years ago, it was mainly to grow pumpkins. One of my favoritest fall activities that we enjoy doing is going to a pumpkin patch. So I wanted to have my own. So we planted them, and decided to add a few things along the way, like cucumbers and corn. That’s how it all originally started……many moons ago.

When I was really obsessed with having my own pumpkin patch, I wanted to grow every type of pumpkin out there. Ghost pumpkins, jack o lanterns, pie pumpkins, big ones, small ones. If there was an odd pumpkin at the patch the year before, I would save the seeds to try to grow it too. There was a time when over half of our garden was pumpkins. There was a few years that we would have so many we would hand them out to family. On the list was also the Dill’s Giant Atlantic pumpkin, of course I had to add that one in, can’t forget about the BIG ones. We tried for a few years and we were never successful. In order the get the “BIG” one, there is a lot of steps you have to take. We would always kill the plants.

3 years ago when we decided to create a homestead with our backyard, we also decided that we really didn’t need half of the garden to be filled with a large variety of pumpkins. We narrowed the list down to 2, a pumpkin jack o lantern mix and pie pumpkins, growing only what we need to decorate for Halloween and to freeze to make goodies throughout the year. Well I have been having a hard time with this adjustment….LOL. So at the very very last minute I decided to buy some Giant Pumpkin seeds and give it one last shot. We had room in one of our brand new planters we built and something needed to go there. So I started 3 plants indoors and planted them in this little itty bitty corner of the planter. Well, what we didn’t expect was for the plants to take off and thrive. We just decided, what happens and happens. We now have a giant pumpkins everywhere. We decided to use 2 of the plants in an attempt to get the “one”. Each of these plants have just one pumpkin on them. The other plant we decided to just grow as many pumpkins as it would like on it. We give them water and we fertilize them. We only sorta follow the instructions to get “the one”. We prune the vines and take off any new pumpkins so the ONE gets all the nutrients. And it’s working very well. The two that we are attempting to get very large, well, they are really getting very large. The smaller one, we named Lucy, is bigger than the average Jack o lantern already, and a very pretty orange color. The GIANT one, his name is Charlie, and he growing at a very rapid rate. He is gaining about 2-4 inches a day (and putting on about 10lbs a day). Its working and we don’t know what to do now. We have our very first GIANT pumpkin that could very well be 500lbs by October or more. We have no plans to enter Charlie in a contest. We are just growing for fun. But now that we actually have a giant pumpkin we aren’t quite sure what do next. So I figured we would just enjoy it and go with the flow.

Here are the pictures of Charlie and Lucy and the rest of the pumpkins on these plants. They are taking over the yard. These span over the last 6 weeks or so.