Growing pumpkins

By Hosea Omole

Pumpkins are amazing. Few other veggies provide food from every part of their physiology. The fleshy fruit is great for boiling, baking or for thickening soup. The seeds are delicious when dry roasted with a sprinkling of salt, and the young leaves and flowers provide a perfect alternative to sukuma wiki (kales).

Yet they are so easy to grow. In fact, if you can grow a vegetable garden, then you have the skills to grow award winning pumpkins. Here are a few tips to get you started.

Numerous Varieties

There are numerous varieties of pumpkins, some of whose names sound like names of wrestlers or characters from a horror movie: Baby boo, Spooktacular, Big Max, Cinderella, Lumila and Atlantic Giant.

Find out from your local seed supplier which ones are in stock. Before making your pick, consider a few things. Each of the varieties comes in different sizes, colours and shapes. If you have a large backyard, the larger varieties would be appropriate. Otherwise stick to the smaller to medium-sized varieties.

As for colour and shape, your discretion is welcome. There is also absolutely nothing wrong with going with different varieties in the same garden. Fortunately, most pumpkin varieties will thrive in most of our regions.

They also get along pretty well when mixed in the same bed with a few other crops. For instance, when planted with beans and maize, the maize provides a good pole for the beans to grow up, which in return trap nitrogen in the soil to benefit the pumpkins. Similarly, the pumpkins provide a dense ground cover to suppress weeds and act as mulch.

Start planting

Choose a sunny spot which receives at least six hours of sun and ensure the ground is well moist before you start planting. But remember that the seeds also need oxygen to germinate, hence too much water in the soil would literally drown the seeds to death.

Pumpkins are typically grown at the centre of small hills or earth mounds of about three feet in diameter and a foot in height. Prepare the hills leaving a trench of about half a foot to hold water around the roots of the plant. If you plan on planting more than one hill, make sure they are at least ten metres apart.

If possible, soak the seeds the night before planting to make sprouting a little smoother. This should, however, not worry you too much.

Plant four to five seeds in a small circle around the centre, spacing them about 15 to 20cm apart. Don’t sink the seeds more than one inch into the soil; just enough to block light and hide them from hungry birds.

For the next two weeks before the seeds germinate, water gently so as not to wash off or expose the seeds. Once the seedlings sprout, thin out the weaker and smaller seedlings to leave just two or three strong healthy ones per mound.