Friday, April 29, 2016

Don't Plant Your Pumpkin Plants in Cold Soil

If you haven't already, put your hoop house over the area that you will be planting your pumpkin plants or put down some clear plastic on the soil to help heat it up.  You don't want to take your plants from the pots in put them in a cold soil.  Cold soil has less biological activity making it harder for the plants to get at nutrients.  This will sometimes stunt the growth of the pumpkin plant and possibly put it into shock.  Warm soil, a little B-vitamins and a touch of kelp will help the plant transition to the soil faster, making for better growth.

Sunday, April 3, 2016

RAW Phosphorous Test Results on Giant Pumpkin Plants

When I can, during the off season, I love to try to test different things to see if what the scientist say and if what the marketers say is true.  I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was going to test to see if adding a very little RAW Phosphorous to the giant pumpkin plants would increase root mass as advertised.

I should note that if these were plants that I was going to actually grow pumpkins on I would have done things a little differently.  I would have gave the phosphorous to the plants once they were in the ground rather than in the pots and I would have got these plants in the ground with hoop houses covering them about 4 or 5 days earlier.

I wouldn't say these tests were scientific, but adequate enough to find some results.  The most definitive results that I have is not about the RAW Phosphorous but on the 747 Johnson seed.  Both of the plants pictured below are from the 747 I did not start them in ideal conditions.  Temperatures were never over 71 degrees and I didn't give them much care.  However, they were aggressive growers with big leaves for only being 3 weeks old, as you can see. The root systems on both plants were also above ordinary.

The science says that RAW Phosphorous will produce a 15% larger roots system.  I gave both plants the same amount of water and both where in the same environment.  Looking at the pictures below I would say visually it looks like the 747 that was given the RAW Phosphorous on the left has a slightly bigger root system on it.  More tests would be needed, but it looks like 15% could be possible. I wish I had taken the plants out of their pots about a week earlier when the roots weren't quite as developed.  It would have made it a little easier to visually see the differences in the root mass.

It should be noted, that if you look at the pictures of the plant when I gave it the phosphorous I purposely gave the plant that was smaller than the one that didn't get phosphorous and it clearly caught up to the other plant.