Julie Huffaker from Farmhouse Harvest says: 'Each plant typically requires at least 400-600 square feet of space. Ensure they have plenty of room to spread out and receive adequate sunlight.' It’s worth taking the time to prepare the ground well, ahead of planting or sowing outdoors, to ensure your pumpkins thrive.

However, you need to pinch off ALL the female flowers, apart from one on the main vine when it appears at a minimum of 10 feet out. The female flowers usually open at sunrise just over a week after they first appear. When they do open, pollinate it as early as possible in the morning with one or more of the male flowers, either from the same plant or another Atlantic Giant. Make sure plenty of pollen is rubbed over the stamen. Then tie up the flower petals with some string to prevent water getting in, contamination, dehydration etc. journal: (in science) A publication in which scientists share their research findings with experts (and sometimes even the public). Some journals publish papers from all fields of science, technology, engineering and math, while others are specific to a single subject. The best journals are peer-reviewed: They send all submitted articles to outside experts to be read and critiqued. The goal, here, is to prevent the publication of mistakes, fraud or sloppy work. Most of the care required is covered in our guide to growing pumpkins, but I’ll go over the main considerations for giant pumpkins here. Get a good Atlantic Giant seed ( you can source good seeds online) and then sow the seed on its edge just below the surface of a small pot of compost inside a warm greenhouse. It takes around 3 weeks to be large enough to plant out at your allotment and you may need to pot it on in the interim. Beyond 3-4 weeks it will start to take over the greenhouse! I’d recommend initially sowing in a greenhouse or on a windowsill three weeks before the final frost of the year (usually after the Grand National in the UK). Then plant out in mid May with a careful eye on the weather forecast for late frosts. In 2016 I got a little ahead of myself, planted out my pumpkins in early May and then got stung by a frost on Eurovision night (I’ll never forget it!). The present day record is over 2700 pounds! Ron Wallace’s giant pumpkin seeds routinely sell on the Internet for hundreds of dollars for a single seed! Here is your chance to grow giant pumpkins with “top of the line” Wallace genetics. Wallace Whoppers are fun to grow and you will be astounded at its amazing rate of growth. Start your own neighborhood competition, or enter one of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth weigh-off’s! Now you can grow like a champion with WOW!As these pumpkins generally take about 120 days to mature, you’ll ideally want to get a head start by seeding seeds indoors in peat pots about a month before your average last frost date.Seeds germinate at temperatures of65° to 75°F and soil temperatures of 70° to90°F. If the pollination has succeeded (and sometimes they don’t), you’ll see the fruit swell day by day. When it’s about the size of an orange it will need piece of plywood covered in sand to lie on. This might need to be adjusted on a daily basis as the fruit grows. Try and manoeuvre the vine so the fruit is on the outside of a curve. You can remove secondary vines if necessary – think 2 months ahead when there is potentially a huge pumpkin there – it will need the space, and you don’t want it growing on top of the vines. While it’s still big enough to lift, carefully place it so it will grow on a large piece of plywood covered with an inch of sand. The Fruit Once your plant has been pollinated and fruit has started to develop behind the flowers, you can begin to give a high potassium feed, such as tomato food.

Crop rotation is an important part of soil health, and it can help to add new nutrients and provide a beneficial environment for the pumpkin. Companion planting can also help with nutrient absorption, as many plants can help to add nitrogen to the soil.The difference between harvesting standard pumpkins and giant pumpkins is obviously going to be the size - it is not going to be simple if the pumpkin has reached show-bench level of size. Secondly, use a pot with ample drainage holes and fill it with a light, free-draining compost. Plant the seeds individually, pointy end down, just under the surface to prevent waterlogging.

Add a canopy of shade cloth over the chosen pumpkin. Full sun is necessary for maximum growth, but sunlight will also harden the skin of the fruit earlier, restricting its ultimatesize.Remove every single additional flower you see after your selected flower has been pollinated, no matter if it’s male or female. environment: The sum of all of the things that exist around some organism or the process and the condition those things create. Environment may refer to the weather and ecosystem in which some animal lives, or, perhaps, the temperature and humidity (or even the placement of things in the vicinity of an item of interest). See our ‘ Pumpkin crop sheet’ for details on how to sow and grow your pumpkin plant. Below is additional month by month advice for growing a giant! Eventually as a plant nears the end of its 120 day cycle it becomes more susceptible to mildew. At that stage its not really worth losing too much sleep over if you have done your very best to water, mulch and foliar feed. I often cut away leaves that are particularly covered if only to slow down its spread across the plant if a fruit still shows signs of gaining weight. You might also like to try spraying with milk – see here. Using bamboo canes again, train each of the secondary vines to grow away at 90 degrees from the main vine. As the secondary vines grow, they in turn will produce tertiary fines at the leaf nodes – these should be pinched off. If you don’t pinch them off, the plant will rapidly turn into a tangled mass of leaves, which will encourage disease and rot. You’ll also find rogue pumpkins lurking in there too, taking energy from the main one! So it’s important to keep up with this work, because at this stage of growth the plant is growing rapidly, with vines increasing in length from 4 – 8 inches per day!