Growing pumpkins / butternut 2016

Bill - this one's for you :)

This summer I tried a different way of growing my pumpkins / butternut.

Previously, I have dug a ruddy great hole in the ground, filled it with compost (or more recently alpaca poo) and then added my pumpkin / butternut seed.

But, the plants spreadeagle themselves everywhere, making mowing round them a nightmare.  Which is a problem, because we like to try and keep the vegetation as short as possible in order to prevent any snakes taking up residence / camouflaging themselves in the undergrowth.  Plus, the plants always succumbed to downy mildew before the season was finished.

I had seen a pumpkin growing concept I forget where, where the pumpkin plants were encouraged to almost grow over an arbour, with the fruit easily visible hanging down from the plants.

Now, I don't have an arbour, nor am I ever like to have one.  But, thinking laterally, I did have a half finished shade cloth veggie patch which I reckoned could be amended to fit the bill.

This took some planning - 8 months in advance.  And that was because I used alpaca poo.  Using straight compost wouldn't entail such forward planning ;)

The tyre towers were placed roughly 1.5 - 2mtrs
(4 - 5 feet) apart

What I did was take the used tyres that RMan scored on the auction many, many years ago, place them at reasonable distances apart round the unfinished veggie patch, fill them with alpaca poo - then allow the winter rains / worms to do their bit.

The pumpkin stems are encouraged to grow along
the wattle pole fence

Come August 2015, two seeds were sown in each tyre tower.  Clever that - because it turned out I had cutworm in two of the tyre towers - how they got in I'll never know.  But, thankfully (and with a bit of repeat sowing) I managed to get a seed (or two) growing in each tower.

I didn't succeed with this tyre - it had too many
 cutworm inside, which I only discovered when I
emptied out the alpaca poo.  The chickens loved
 their easy meal though :)  I have since planted a
 sweet potato in this tyre and it is doing well. That
 too will be easy to harvest when it is time

As the plants grow, I merely encourage the stems to suspend themselves on the horizontal wattle poles every time I water the plants from the rainwater tanks - which is roughly twice a week.  Once the plants were established, I also added mulch to the top of the decomposed alpaca poo - to prevent evapouration from the surface.

Harvesting the pumpkins / butternut will be a breeze

As the fruit is developing, it hangs visible on the wattle fence - which will make it easier to harvest, and prevents it from being attacked by slugs, etc.

No sign of downy mildew on these
 pumpkin leaves :)

The plants are all healthy.  They are producing fruit madly.  And there is absolutely no sign (thank God) of the normal downy mildew which has plagued my pumpkin / butternut plants in the past.  Obviously, the air that is able to waft passed the leaves helps in that regard.  I have only had two days where the leaves have wilted slightly from the heat / insufficient water.

And, most importantly, the stems / leaves are not cluttering up the land making mowing impossible.

This system of growing pumpkins / butternuts has worked so incredibly well,  I am definitely doing this again next year :)  Probably the only change I will make is to paint the tyres white - that should help to keep them / the compost inside them that little bit cooler, especially if we hit extreme temperatures similar to those we have seen this summer so far.