Pumping out pumpkins: Growing your own gourds for Halloween

ROYAL CITY — With October here, Halloween is fast approaching. While it’s a little late to start a pumpkin crop this season for jack-o’-lanterns ready, it’s not too early to start a crop for next season.

Dan Mickle, of Mickle Farms & Pumpkin Patch in Royal City, is in his fourth year growing a pumpkin patch to sell, but has been growing giant pumpkins as a hobby for probably the last 15 years. Mickle said he and his wife, Nicole Mickle, started about 50 different varieties of pumpkins this spring with some cured and ready to harvest and others still growing.

The unprecedented heat wave in June put a lot of the plants a few weeks behind, Mickle said.

“It didn’t hurt the plants themselves, it hurt the pumpkins that should have been setting at the time,” Mickle said. “Any time you get above 90 degrees, the female pumpkin will actually abort. There will be more down the line, but we had about two weeks where it was too hot to set any.”

Mickle said he grows varieties that take between 120 and 125 days to mature and others, like the orange jack-o’-lantern varieties, which are about a 90-day pumpkin. Most of those, he said he planted around the middle of May.

He said he starts every season with a soil test to find out what micronutrients need to be added, and gives the pumpkins some micronutrients throughout the season, as well. Mickle said he’s typically watering every couple of days, but there’s no issue with watering every day.

“You just don’t want to water for an hour every day. Pumpkins don’t like to swim, so to speak,” Mickle said.

He said he lost some entire varieties of pumpkins to the heat wave, an issue they haven’t dealt with in the past. While some varieties did better than others, he said the orange pumpkins have been pretty resilient, while some of the ornamental varieties didn’t fare as well.

Even watering and keeping pumpkins pest free are a couple of the main tips he said keep pumpkin crops healthy and flourishing.

“You get squash bugs at the wrong time and they’ll decimate your entire patch if you’re not on top of them,” Mickle said. “Scouting your plants, checking the underside of leaves for bugs, even curtailing into powdery mildew, a later season fungal issue. If you can keep that at bay, it keeps those plants healthier longer.”

The powdery mildew is an issue he said arises closer to harvest season, but will kill off plants quite a bit sooner than normal if left unattended.

Mickle said color will be the telling factor for when pumpkins are ready to harvest. Orange pumpkins will start out green before turning orange and hardening up their rind. Others will have the stem turn to a darker shade of green.

“Once they reach maturity, they won’t typically grow anymore,” Mickle said. “They may actually lose weight, but you’re not actually gonna lose the pumpkin unless it’s out in the heat.”

For anyone interested in growing giant pumpkins, Mickle said there are a few different preferred methods and plenty of Facebook groups with tips and tricks. He said the big thing to consider is making sure growers have plenty of space for the plant, even as large as 30-by-30 feet for one pumpkin.

“That’s kind of the method that’s preferred by most of the big growers; there’s a lot of pruning techniques,” Mickle said. “You’re trying to focus all of the energy into that one fruit.”

Starting out with the right seed doesn’t hurt, either. Atlantic Giants are the seeds known for producing behemoths, with some growing as large as 2,500 pounds.