All of this talk about the future made me realize that I often forget to enjoy the present moment, especially when I feel like I only have a certain amount of time to get something done, but my “looking to the future” is justified as delayed planting has been a huge problem for most of the Midwest, especially the corn farmers who have only planted a 1/4 of the corn crops so far. Despite the cold and wet weather putting a damper on my gardening, I promised myself that going forward, I’m going to savor every gardening day, even the humid / 90+ degree days.

The day Mar-Duke farm opened (Friday, May 6th) was also the day Mary and I were to get a quadrant of our amalgams removed, so of course we were stuck in traffic during rush hour while twenty cubic yards of compost sit waiting to be spread and the threat of rain imminent. Thanks to President Grant and handful of eager basketball players at McCollum Park (as well as Mary and my mom), I was able to get the compost spread in just over two hours. I also had enough time to add my soil amendments (dried blood, gypsum and sulfur).

Saturday was spent tilling, planting seeds and transplanting starters. The entire process took about 6 hours and left Mary and I with dozens of aches and pains to complain about for the next few days. Nevertheless, the hard part is done and the fun part begins! Check out the virtual tour of our garden!

Mar-Duke Farm – Downers Grove, IL in USA

This year, I’ll have 4 plots. Each plot is 20′x30′ or 600 square feet, which means that I’ll be working with 2400 square feet of garden! I’m going to be purchasing about 20-22 cubic yards of compost from Organimix, at $17 per cubic yard, that’ll run me about $374.00 for the compost itself, but it is so worth every penny. That doesn’t include the shipping cost, which will run about $150. It’s a business expense so it’s all good! Thanks Uncle Sam, we pay for your stupid shit and now you’re paying for mine. (except mine isn’t stupid)

Even though it’s only February 27th, I’m making sure that I’m totally prepared this year. I’ve devised a little table of when to plant the pumpkins to make sure I don’t harvest them too early. Last year I had pumpkins in August. This year I’m going to stagger the growing so that I harvest at various times (Sept 1st, Oct 1st and Oct 25th).

• Beets, cilantro, chives, chamomile and lettuce will be sowed as soon as I’m done tilling the plots
• Pump-ke-mon – sow June 1st for a September 1st harvest
• Aladdin – sow June 1st for October 1st harvest, sow July 1st for a October 25th harvest
• Jack Be Little – sow second week of May for a September 1st harvest, sow second week of June for an October 1st harvest
• Lumina – sow May 15th for an October 1st harvest
• Howden – sow June 1st for an October 1st harvest, sow June 20th for an October 25th harvest
• Magician – sow June 15th for an October 1st harvest, sow July 1st for an October 25th harvest
• Iron Man – sow June 15th for an October 1st harvest
• Prizewinner – sow after first frost (this is a BIG one)

I’m going to attempt to grow tomatoes, peppers and artichokes this year, which means that I need to wrap this up and head over to the garden center and get some pots so that I can start the seeds! Hard to believe, but spring is right around the corner!

Powdery mildew loves high humidity as it helps the spores germinate and it loves plants that are super crowded as it makes it easier for the spores to progress and infect other parts of the plant. It’s important to keep the air circulating around the plants. Being in the middle of a large co-op, it’s hard to control all aspects of the environment and these things are bound to happen, the best you can do is to cut the leaves that are really infected and try to control them naturally or with the use of fungicides. I couldn’t tell you what chemicals to use, but I can offer a natural solution that I’m still testing. It’s called Neem Oil concentrate and is completely natural as it comes from the Indian Neem plant. I purchased a small concentrated bottle at the local gardening center and it seems to be working. I put about 2 Tablespoons of it into 2 gallons of water and sprayed all parts of the plants. It took quite some time, but I’m hopeful that it will prevent it from spreading.

Despite the setback, the plants are doing great and the personalities are starting to show up in texture and color! Check out the images below to catch a little peak of the pumpkins that are currently growing. The last time I counted I had over 60 pumpkins growing! Most of them are the smaller “Little October” variety, but I’m still excited and think I’ll have no problem hitting my goal of 100!

One of my large (carving variety) pumpkins is actually starting to mature and I’m pretty sure that I’ll be taking it off of the vine in the next week or two. I never thought I’d have a matured pumpkin in the middle of July, but I guess this one was eager to either get eaten, carved or photographed. Or maybe all of the above!

The two Atlantic varieties are complete opposites. One’s leaf growth seems stunted even though the fruit is huge and the other one just got it’s fruit and the leaf growth is out of control. I’m looking forward to growing a hundred pound pumpkin! We’ll see how it goes! Greg says that he’ll be impressed if I do, but he’s also the one that said that I shouldn’t get my hopes up when I told him I planned on growing 100+ pumpkins this year! We’ll see Greg!

As you can see from the above time-lapse, the patch is really starting to fill in! I can still get in there, but plants are starting to touch and grow on top of each other! I suppose that’s a good thing, but we’ll see how well they do competing for real estate.

At this point in the growing season, I’ve gone through 2 gallons of fish emulsion and it’s worth noting that I focused more of the fertilizer on the plants that were off to a slow start. That includes the three plants on the left side of the patch. I went a bit heavier on those and it’s obvious that they had a major growth spurt. Now I just need to fertilize the Atlantic Giants since their growth seems to be stunted a bit.

In addition to all of the growth, the flowers have started to bloom, and with each flower comes the possibility of a pumpkin.  Pumpkins are monoecious plants and have separate male and female flowers. The female flower can be identified by locating the ovary below the base of the flower. Based on my experience, for each female flower that opens, there are usually 2 male flowers. This is not always the case, as I’ve also seen a female on one plant without any males.

If I can’t make it out to the pumpkin patch to manually pollinate the females, the bees will do the job. They fly from flower to flower collecting pollen for themselves and by chance they end up getting male pollen on their bodies which then rubs up against the female stigma. I’m sure there is more to it, but it’s important to note how important bees are in the grand scheme of things.

I’ve also spent a bit of time burying vines on the varieties that grow secondary root systems on the outer vines. Not only does the secondary root systems help the pumpkin from flopping around during storms and/or periods of high wind, but it also helps them absorb more nutrients which helps growth. Want bigger plants and bigger pumpkins? Bury the vines. Below you’ll find an images that shows the beginning of the secondary root systems. It’s ALIVE!!

Note: Earlier this week I pollinated 18 females. That is on top of the 3-4 pumpkins that are already growing.

Growth over a one week period

I thought that dirt was dirt and I failed to realize that plants need food too! Last year’s soil was in a different location, but the story was the same. The soil was used and abused and never renewed. As each passing day goes by I realize more and more that everything is energy and that energy is never created or destroyed, it just changes form. Plants, just like animals, need sunlight, water and food! At one point in time the soil at the plot may have had some nutritional value, but over the years the plants have absorbed those nutrients leaving the soil defunct. In a nutshell, a plant will only do as good as the soil it’s in. I wish I had a way to compare last year’s patch to this year’s, you’d see the difference!

So far I’ve only used two gallons of Fish Emulsion on the entire patch. The images below are a direct result of fertilizing. I fertilized the plants on the 15th of June and the images below are from the 20th. Wow! What a difference after giving them some food, water and plenty of sunlight! I fertilized the smaller plants again today to give them even more of aboost and I’ll likely fertilize again in about a week or so depending on how fast they are growing.

Today I manually pollinated an Atlantic female and I took some shots of my first pumpkin! It’s about the size of a baseball right now, it’s growing fast and it looks very healthy.

The patch looks great and the weeds have been defeated (for the most part). I didn’t get too close to the plants (stayed about a foot and a half away) to make sure that I didn’t damage the root systems, but the areas that have been tilled are going to make it easy for the roots to sprawl out even further.  Oh yeah, it looks much nicer too!

Also, some of my plants have female flowers that are blooming and ready to be pollinated! I hand pollinated the one pictured above today, which means that pumpkins are just around the corner! Since I have so many different varieties of pumpkins, there is a good chance of some weird varieties popping up in the patch.

As we approach the Summer Solstice, the days are starting to grow longer and longer and the plants know it. They are getting plenty of sun, plenty of water and plenty of food. During this stage of the growing process, nitrogen is important for the production of leaves which will aid in the production of pumpkins. My goal for the next 3 weeks or so is to fertilize and water to ensure maximum leaf coverage. The larger the plant, the more pumpkins I can anticipate.

The cucumber beetle population is not out of control. The leaves have a few bite marks here and there, but nothing serious. The Neem Oil seems to be safe after testing on two plants so I’ve got a natural pesticide and fungicide ready to go!

I want to keep the pumpkin patch organic, but at the same time I want to make sure that these little buggers don’t kill the plants and/or infect the plants with disease. My goal this year to yield about 100+ pumpkins. That might seem like a really high number, but I am growing a couple of Jack-Be-Little plants (the tiny variety) so I’m sure I can get two to three dozen of these which should account for about a third of the 100.

The other day, I began researching organic methods of controlling these pests and stumbled upon a little thing called Neem Oil Concentrate which is an oil derived from the fruits and seeds of an Indian Evergreen tree known as the Neem. It was under $20 at the local garden store and since it’s in a concentrated form, it’ll make more then I’ll be able to use all year. It is also said to help control powdery mildew, which will come in hand towards the end of the growing season. You can see the damage that the beetles have caused in the images below. From the looks of it, they have taken bites out of all of the plants in my patch, but they are more fond of certain breeds, especially the Atlantic plant.

So today I sprayed two of the plants (the Atlantic and the very small one on the east side of the patch) and I also gave all of the plants a drink of fertilizer. I spread out about 6 tablespoons over three watering cans and applied them to all of the plants. Most of them already have a nice deep green color, but I’d love a nice growth spurt!

While photographing the plants today, I noticed that I had a cucumber beetle on one of them and I immediately called Greg. He said it was really early in the season to see them, but it was REALLY hot the last few days so he’s not surprised.  I’ve read about some natural ways to prevent them from eating your plants, so I’ll have to revisit those articles and get ready to protect my plants. Last year they came and went and my plants were okay, but I could have just been lucky. More on cucumber beetles in the next post as I prepare to do battle with the Cucurbitaceae eaters!