I recently posted a video on the pumpkins growing from our compost pile, and beneath I got a very interesting comment on how one family grew their annual pumpkins.
TheVTRainMan writes:
When I was a kid my parents used to grow pumpkins every year in a corner of our yard just by throwing in a single pumpkin into the leaf cleanup pile. The next year another batch would grow while the leaves broke down from the previous fall. Never watered them, never bothered them until the fall. That’s when we would pick all but one and then proceed to bury it in the leaves again for next year.
This is really just the way to do it. We’re going to try it and see what happens.
My friends Avery, Kai and Ariana from Sacred Vision Studios visited our plant sale on Saturday and took home a pumpkin – you can see a video of Avery opening it here. Nice, thick flesh! We haven’t eaten one yet, as we usually give them a few weeks to cure and become more flavorful, so it was interesting to see one opened. Looks very good.
We’ll have lots of weeds and leaves and waste as we clean up the homestead this fall. Obviously, we’ll have to rake up some piles around the edges of the gardens and throw pumpkins into them.
This isn’t the first time we’ve had great success growing pumpkins from the compost pile. That post is from 2014. They were a really excellent variety. We’ll see how the new ones compare.
5 comments
This technique is not limited to pumpkins or related annual vegetables. I piled up yard waste against a hurricane fence and let it decay/compost, planting fruit trees near the edge of the compost area. The trees grow fast, are healthy, and don’t need any chemical fertilizer.
That makes sense for sure. Organic matter is like magic.
This is the way. I am now convinced.
We get discarded produce form the local market, once a week.
A few years ago, they gave us gourds. The hens ignored them. So we picked them up from the hencompost area, and threw them into a “low spot” in the yard. Yes, the next year we had a bumper crop of beautiful gourds. One year the only summer-squash-that-cannot-be-named we got was from a plant that grew from some seeds the hens didn’t eat, when said summer squashes were thrown under a bunch of brambles for them, the previous year.
Between our experience this year with “the only viable squash are from compost piles” and the devastation those nasty squash bugs wreaked on my purposefully-planted squash beds, I’m throwing some seeds and pulp around this autumn to see what happens NEXT year.
The pumpkin was awesome, definitely one of the best looking pumpkins we’ve ever seen, FAR better than any store bought pumpkin. We look forward to growing your variety and seeing if we can grow them as thick and fruity as yours was. And thanks for the plug to our website!
That’s great, Avery! Just throw the guts in the compost pile, I guess!