GROWING SEMINOLE PUMPKINS
These pumpkin vines can look awful suffering from downy mildew, but they live anyway, even without spraying fungicides. Plants prefer growing in our summertime heat and rain and the vines get very, very long. Roots develop along the vines, at the leaf nodes, so even if something happens to the planted end of the vine it just keeps growing. I pick up and move the vines to where I want them to be, keeping it nice and tidy so that they are not all over my garden.
The biggest issue I have had with this pumpkin is POLLINATION. Without getting into details, bees perform sex between a male and female flower so the female can give birth to a fruit. If the female is not pollinated, the fruit drops from the vine.
Photo below is of a FEMALE flower. Look at the base of the flower.
Below photo is of a MALE flower. Look at the base of the flower.
After one of our pumpkins rotted on the ground, we started putting each pumpkin on a cement block or an inverted Styrofoam egg carton.
Harvest pumpkins when the vines start dying and from when they are tan to they start to change from green to tan. Use up the pumpkins with any visible outer damage first. Insects have been harsh on my pumpkins this year with lots of scarring on the outside. Save the perfect ones to eat later and to show off to your friends. Seminole pumpkins can store for up to a year if kept in a cool, dark place with air circulation. Ours don't last that long because we keep our house temperature at 82ยบ in the summer.
EatTheWeeds.com states: "Boiled or baked, used as a vegetable, dried and ground into a flour for bread, young shoots and leaves cooked as greens, flowers with pistils removed cooked and eaten. They can also be stuffed. Seeds edible, can be roasted or hulled and ground into a gruel."
I believe I ordered my first Seminole Pumpkin seeds from Southern Exposure about 9 years ago. Since then, I have used my own seed and never stopped loving this plant. Here's why:
- It is easy to start in the SUMMER rainy season when nothing else grows: plant and ignore
- It gets "sick" with downy and powdery mildew BUT IT JUST KEEPS GROWING
- It gets "attacked" by squash bugs, thrips, and melon/pickle caterpillars BUT IT JUST KEEPS GROWING
- Their vines grow EVERYWHERE: Just pick up the vines and plop them back down on itself before it sets roots in your lawn... [not a bad thing either ;)]
- It requires bees or hand pollination to fruit: I make my life easier by planting a FEW bee plants nearby
