Spend 4th of July with Thoughts of Thanksgiving

July Fourth is a Great Day to Start Planting Pumpkins

Oct 19, 2009

Pumpkins are great complements to the Fall holiday season. Rather than visiting someone else's pumpkin patch, why not bring Halloween and Thanksgiving to life at home?

Carving pumpkins for Halloween, baking pumpkin seeds, and eating pumpkin pie can be some of the best parts of the October and November holidays.

Visiting pumpkin patches, such as Anderson Farms in Leesville, Louisiana, can be great fun. Kids can run through hay or corn mazes, pick their own pumpkins, and even feed farm animals. But the Halloween and Thanksgiving holidays can be even more majestic with a pumpkin patch right at home.

Start Planting for Pumpkins in Early July

A great time to start planting for Halloween and Thanksgiving pumpkins is the 4th of July. Planting around this time will bring a luscious crop within three to four months so long as the following is considered:

Pumpkins are thirsty. Like humans, proper hydration is vital, but also like humans, too much water is not good either. The key to properly caring for pumpkins is to keep the soil moist, but not soaking. Too much water can cause suffocation.

Sunlight is not bad for pumpkins, but too much of it can damage the skin or inhibit the growth by causing the skin to harden prematurely. To prevent this, growers can plant in the shade, which may also help with soil moisture, or concoct a means to protect their crops from the Sun, such as is demonstrated on the website, PumpkinNook.com.

Pumpkins are what gardeners sometimes call "heavy feeders." They like rich, fertilized soil. Great fertilizers can include manure, liquid brands, or a bag of 5-10-5 PTK available in the gardening section of one's local hardware store. For those with less concern, but still want to fertilize, digging up the area and enriching it with a fertilized potting soil can be a great way to spur pumpkin growth without going the extra mile.

The danger in fertilizer is using too much. Too much fertilizer will burn whatever it touches, whether it's a patch of lawn, tomatoes, or pumpkins meant to be Jack-o-Lanterns.

Uses for a Pumpkin Patch at Home

While starting a pumpkin farm on one's property like Anderson Farms may be desirable for some, most people do not have quite enough property to make an honest go of such an enterprise.

That does not mean, though, that home grown pumpkins cannot be sold. Farmer's markets are the ideal venue for such weekend entrepreneurs.

Those who do not want to leave home can place an ad in the local paper about pumpkins for sale right off the vine. Of course, this should be conveniently scheduled around one's regular job. It would be a shame for customers to come around on a Wednesday afternoon because the ad had no posted schedule just as it would be a shame for growers to have customers knocking on their doors at dinnertime.

The great value is that the customers who really care about quality will be willing to pay just as much as they would at the grocery store for fruit they can pick from the source.

For those with children that have birthdays around Halloween, a pumpkin patch birthday party would make for great fun that few birthday parties have. Rather than go home with goody bags full of 10 cent gum and Tootsie Rolls, kids can go home with their own pumpkin!

The 4th of July may seem like an odd time to be thinking of Thanksgiving and Halloween, but it is the perfect time to be thinking of starting a pumpkin crop. Growing fruit at home can be fun, rewarding, and profitable, making a homemade pumpkin patch all the more worthwhile.

The copyright of the article Spend 4th of July with Thoughts of Thanksgiving in Orchards/Fruit Gardening is owned by Christopher Pascale. Permission to republish Spend 4th of July with Thoughts of Thanksgiving in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.