My very good friend is moving into a new house, but it has lots of grass... not so good for growing food. I asked her if I could put a pumpkin patch in. For a minimal amount of work, we kill the grass, AND get pumpkins! Come autumn, It's gonna be awesome! Come back, you will see!
Here's how I did it!
Step 1: Lay down black plastic. You can buy a pretty large roll at Lowes for about $20.
Step 2: Cut 2 feet holes in the plastic about 3 feet apart. Pumpkins love space to grow!
Step 3: Dig holes in your holes and mix compost in. Pumpkins are greedy eaters, and they LOVE compost or manure! For my friend's patch I mixed 1/2 a bag of steer manure into each hole, and some slow release organic fertilizer. Manure at Lowes is $1 a bag.
Step 4: Line your holes with something heavy, rocks or such. We had bricks, so we used those!
Step 5: Plant your pumpkins! I have a few varieties I really like, so I planted Cinderella pumpkins,
Orange cutie pumpkins, (I know, they are a hybrid, but I just thought they were so pretty! I couldn't resist!) and baby boo pumpkins. Because I don't plan to plant the seeds next year, I am comfortable with them sharing the same space!
This is really all you need to do... as long as you don't want extra credit points...
For extra credit, I installed a simple watering system. My friend has just bought her house, so I don't want her to spend lots of time watering, so I picked up a rainbird 8 drip watering system and ran hoses to each pumpkin plant. I secured them with some garden stakes, so that the hoses stayed put. Pumpkins really don't like water on their leaves, and are pretty vulnerable to powdery mildew, so conventional sprinklers aren't really all that great. Watering at the base, and watering often makes them happy!
This looks like a great idea! We have way more lawn than we need, and we're sick of mowing it. How do you feel the black plastic stacks up against the cardboard and mulch method, or is it a preparation step?
ReplyDeleteCardboard and mulch is a great idea! It is environmentally friendly,decomposes, and frankly, I think that mulch is prettier than plastic. Here is the problem (and it is not really a problem if you are not lazy like me) You need to have a minimum of about 3 layers of cardboard to make this method effective. Weeds sense cracks in any system and they take advantage! I have found that Bind weed especially will take advantage of the spaces between the boxes. If you don't want to go 3 layers of cardboard, pick up some old copies of news papers, and use them but hose them down. Wet paper helps damper weeds. Good luck!!!
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