Friday, June 25, 2010

Hot in the Pumpkin Patch Today!

Its 11:00 in Denver and it is already 93 degrees today with a forecasted high of 99 degrees. Not good pumpkin growing weather. This year's plant seems fine up to about 92 degrees and then after that the heat starts burning up the new leaves. I saw a little of that yesterday on the new leaves on the side vines.

To combat the high temps I've got chairs over the main vine tips to shade them as well as over the pumpkins. At 11:00 and 12:00 I've got the sprinklers set to run for 1 minute and from 1:00-4:00 I've got the sprinkler timer set to mist mode which means it will run every 15 minutes for 20 seconds to cool off the leaves. And then at 5:00 I've got the timer to run the sprinkler again for one minute. That along with the 14% shade from the hail netting will hopefully keep the plants happy today.

I split 1/8 cup of fish & seaweed between both plants yesterday evening. Between that and the warm night last night caused a fair amount of growth before this morning. Seemed like there were new long tendrils everywhere today.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I grew my first pumpkin last year he only reach 70 lbs but for my first time I thought that I did well. I fell in love with it and now am growing more, I read your blog all the time. My plants are no where near yours had some bad weather this year:( But on one of my plants looks like tiger strips on the leaves, to me it doesn't look like mildew since I got that last Aug/Sept can plants have a different color to them? Thanks

Jamie said...

My first pumpkin was around 70 pounds too. The more you learn, the harder you work and the better seeds you get the bigger those pumpkins grow.

What colors are the tiger stripes? Off the top of my head I'm not sure what that would be but I'm not sure what you are describing.

Anonymous said...

I know its very different from what I have seen and cant find anything on the internet about it. The leaves just have a very pale color maybe white/greenish but looks like tiger stripes and not the spots that mildew typically tend to have. It is still growing and doing great just a little different looking

Jamie said...

It is hard to figure this one out without seeing it but if the plant is happy I'm guessing things are okay.