August 25, 2008

Pumpkins

One of the many things that make people think about Halloween and that's PUMPKINS! Those orange or white gourds put some into that Halloween mood. Now this year I decided to be adventurous and grow my own, so towards the start of spring I bought some seeds from a local store, planted them in buckets till they were bigger to put in the ground. I also bought some pumpkin plants from a nursery which didn't do very well I might add. Start them from seeds if you can because mine grew and grew like mad. I ended up doing an experiment with one plant to see if what I heard/read worked. I guessed on the amounts since I forget the website where I saw it at. Milk and sugar mixture, cut a small slit in the stem, don't cut too deep, insert a wick into the slit, in my case I used a rolled out cotton ball. Lead the other half of the wick into a bowl with your milk/sugar mix in it. Now I'll give my results on my milk feed pumpkin so far, it's done great! It's grown faster and it was the first to put out fruit, which now is pretty big. The others are doing fine, have fruit on them too but the ones I got from the nursery have died or aren't putting anything out. My plants also got plagued by powdery mildew which is a common occurrence in the warm summer months because of heat and humidity. So I battled it with a mixture of Murphy's Oil Soap, Baking Soda and water, mixed in a gallon jug then put into a spray bottle for easy use. It took care of the problem pretty quickly I might add, I spray it everyonce in a while to keep it at bay. I'll post the measurements up a bit later today. Now onto the photos of the pumpkins!

Dubbed Pumpking
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