[Joey]

Not sure if this is where this thread should go. Apologies if it's not.

So, does anyone here grow pumpkins? Or rather, can anyone here who knows what they're doing help out someone as horribly black thumbed as me?

I first tried growing the things this year, and it all went bad. I only saw two pumpkins out of all 5 plants I had going, and one shriveled, and the other just fell off it's stem. In addition, all the leaves acquired this weird white powdery maybe fungus stuff before eventually dying.

My best guess is that 1, my soil didn't have nearly enough nutrients, and 2, watering from above was a bad idea. I also think I may have had them too crowded, I had to keep them within a certain area so I kept turning the vines around. Another factor could have been lack of sunlight, but not as much as the other reasons I could think of.

So, any tips from master pumpkin growers?

[Dragon]

I have grown pumpkins ever since 93 but honestly, I have never grown any pumpkins big enough to carve and I have never had more than three pumpkins per year.

This year, I had three pumpkins growing. Two of them bit the dust (insects managed to penetrate the pumpkin shell). Only one survived.

There's all kinds of things you have to do to keep up. Fertilizer is a plus. Some say you gotta water at least once a day, even twice when the pumpkins are growing since they're water hogs.

Then you gotta deal with squash vine borers and other insects that can damage the pumpkin plant and the pumpkins.

The white stuff sounds like powdery mildew: http://www.ag.ohio-state.edu/~vegnet/re ... m96pmk.htm