A Smart Way to Plant Pumpkins

I recently posted a video on the pumpkins growing from our compost pile, and beneath I got a very interesting comment on how one family grew their annual pumpkins.

TheVTRainMan writes:

When I was a kid my parents used to grow pumpkins every year in a corner of our yard just by throwing in a single pumpkin into the leaf cleanup pile. The next year another batch would grow while the leaves broke down from the previous fall. Never watered them, never bothered them until the fall. That’s when we would pick all but one and then proceed to bury it in the leaves again for next year.

This is really just the way to do it. We’re going to try it and see what happens.

My friends Avery, Kai and Ariana from Sacred Vision Studios visited our plant sale on Saturday and took home a pumpkin – you can see a video of Avery opening it here. Nice, thick flesh! We haven’t eaten one yet, as we usually give them a few weeks to cure and become more flavorful, so it was interesting to see one opened. Looks very good.

We’ll have lots of weeds and leaves and waste as we clean up the homestead this fall. Obviously, we’ll have to rake up some piles around the edges of the gardens and throw pumpkins into them.

This isn’t the first time we’ve had great success growing pumpkins from the compost pile. That post is from 2014. They were a really excellent variety. We’ll see how the new ones compare.

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