How to grow pumpkins

In this guide you will learn the basics of growing pumpkins, big and small.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• What you will need is a piece of land, a back yard or containers of some sort that are clean.

1. To start your pumpkins from seed, buy a package of pumpkin seeds from a hardware store or anywhere else they sell packaged seeds, and plant them, a few at a time in 2" or 3" pots. Plant as many as you want but water them and don't let them ge oo dry. Place them in a warm, sunny spot or next to a warm source. If necessary you can use florescent lights to speed the germination process.

2. After a week or two, the seedlings should appear. The next step is to add a bit of fertilizer, dry or liquid. I prefer dry fertilizer because you can sprinkle it on top of the soil and pat it down gently.

3. Now all that there is to do is to watch the plants grow and take shape. Still water frequently so as not to let the seedlings dry out. Once they are an inch or two tall you can start to transplant them to a bigger container. You can wait until they get a little bigger, but I prefer to judge the seedlings by the size of the pot that they were originally planted in. Once they have reached about 3", I would transplant them before hey overcrowd the pot with their roots.

Tips & Warnings

• Vegetables like to be planted directly in the ground outdoors.I always learned to plant rows about a foot apart and space your seed 4-6"apart. That's the farming method anyway. You can grow them from seed indoors like I suggested but when they get 4-6" tall, I recomment that you transplant them into your garden. Any where is okay. You can plant them among the other vegetables or in a spot all of their own. If you decide to keep the seedlings planted in their own pot for container planting, remember to keep transplanting them them to a bigger pot as they grow in size. When they have reached maturity then you'll know what size pot they should be in.
• When planting seeds outdoors, plant them after the first frost. This allows the seeds to be out of danger of the frost. I think that it's best to plant your seeds in the Spring, but there are some exceptions to that rule.