How to grow a low maintenance pumpkin patch

We LOVE growing pumpkins here in BearCountry. BabyBear sells pumpkin bread at the Farmer’s Market and we enjoy having frozen pumpkin puree on hand for ourselves too. If you are in the market for a GREAT pie pumpkin I highly recommend Winter Luxury. It has the highest yield, a thin skin and the closest taste to canned pumpkin that everyone is used to. Sometimes a whole garden plot (40ft by 40ft) is dedicated just to pumpkins. If we had to weed a plot that big I’d never be able to keep up so we use black plastic to suppress the weeds. Ideally we’d use permeable landscape fabric, but black plastic fits our budget. We’ve been using the same $100 investment for 6 years. Whatever your chosen weed suppression method is I have a trick that will help you concentrate your watering where the pumpkin plants are and not give the weeds any more help than they get from mother nature.

We bury 5 gallon buckets and then position two plants opposite each other. Before we bury them we use a drill to put two small holes in the bottom of the bucket and a hole on either side where the plants will be placed.

We use the handle as a reference so we always know where the holes are. It takes a few weeks for the roots to reach down to the water source, but it’s good for them to have to work their way down as fast as possible.

BrotherBear helped me get our 8 buckets prepped and sunk into the existing holes in our black plastic.

You can see a bucket that isn’t surrounded by plastic in the foreground. That is where our two watermelon plants were protected in coffee cans until they were well established.

We kept the plants watered at the surface and filled the buckets half way until the plants were big enough to get all their water from the bucket drip system.

By mid summer when it the plants were at risk for wilting in the hot afternoon sun I never had to worry that I’d lose a plant because they could draw from the bucket if they needed it. I would fill the buckets when I watered the rest of the plants and knew that they were getting all the water they needed for the day.

Eventually the buckets get really hard to find so I add tall sticks to mark where the buckets are.

By September the leaves start to dry up and the pumpkins have finished ripening. This patch of 16 pumpkins provided us with 120 cups of pumpkin puree (from the 8 winter luxury pumpkin plants) and enough big pumpkins for our family to carve.

An earlier version of the self watering pumpkin patch used milk jugs with holes in the cap. This worked too, but I wanted something that could last more than one day between waterings. Of course a lot of that is weather dependent, but here in zone 4b we can get very hot and humid which means GREAT growing conditions IF the plants have enough water.

If you give this self watering garden method I try I’d love to hear about it!