First year reflections

Title: First year reflections
OK, based on the season so far here is my łTop 15˛ list of things I have learned this year.  Yes, some of them are common sense now.  But they werenąt 4 months ago for me.  I hope you find them of interest.  In case you are curious I have my perfectly shaped 140 lb pumpkin sitting out in the patch.  No record breaker I know, but quite a nice Halloween pumpkin for my first try.  (Assuming my luck doesnąt run out of course....)  In regards to the following, remember, I'm no expert.  This was all just picked up through reading or try and error.

Thoughts on my first season:

1)  Start earlier next year!  A May 28th germination is too late.  Though my plant was robust from the start and faced no damaging frost.  It also went almost directly outside.

2)  Use the biggest peat pots I can find.  Enough said.

3)  Donąt buy generic seeds from a catalog, there are tons of great people willing to share seed that has a proven family tree and needs to be tested for its genetic potential.

4)  Vine bury more aggressively, especially the first 6 feet or so of primary vine and get a good root system well anchored.  Also, a dab of rooting hormone didnąt seem to hurt any.

5)  Make a fertilization schedule and follow it in order to augment the plants phases through the season.

6) Read Don Langevinąs 2nd book - twice.

7)  Get a material under the pumpkin early on.  The jury is still out on the result I got using bubble wrap this year... no problems yet.

8)  Adjust the position of the pumpkin when it is HOT.  Above 90 degrees F it becomes surprisingly easy.

9)  To kill vine borers:  Find the infected area.  Take a long pin and stab it through the vine repeatedly from various directions.  This seemed to kill them, and seemed to do less damage than I tended to do with a knife.  Afterwards I treated the stems with concentrated seaweed solution and buried them with composted manure.  I set a pumpkin on a vine that I did this too.  I had almost cut the vine it was wilting so badly at one point before the surgery.

10) Newspaper with a layer of straw on top does not make a half bad mulch.  Itąs cheap, and seemed to keep 95% of the weeds down.  Also, the pumpkin can fire roots down right through it.

11)  Not sure what to do about pesticides.  I didnąt use anything and only had a touch of SVB.  The thing I noticed was an abundance of birds, frogs and snakes around my patch.  Maybe they wouldnąt have been around if I had nuked all the little pests.  Are they the reason I had so few bugs?  Or was it just that the bugs weren't lying in wait in my first year patch.  

12)  Having a pack of wild coyotes around beats the best of woodchuck traps.....  

13)  These plants are tougher than they seem at times.  Cut vines tossed to the side frequently keep growing and often have male blossoms after being cut.  Not sure this has any practical value, but it was a sight to see.

14)  There are some really awesome pumpkin webpages online.  Also, there IS a pumpkin FAQ out there.  http://www.backyardgardener.com/faq.html   Some of you may have mentioned it.  And yes, it does have many of the answer to our most frequent questions.....

CAUTION:  This is where my reflections on pumpkins ends and my reflections on listserves begin.  If you are tired of hearing about this issue, STOP HERE!

15)  Being a longtime listserve veteran, (on lists other than this one, I am a freshman here) listserves go through phases, it is a fact of life.  Any listserve that a group of people actually use inevitable annoy some of its population periodically.  This is how I met my wife.  But that is another story that has nothing to do with pumpkins, people will have to let me know if they want to hear that tale.

You have a multitude of choices if you find yourself getting annoyed:

*Delete lots of messages without reading them for awhile.  Especially ones title,
łRe:  RE: re: Re:  Problems with this list.˛

*Filter individuals who annoy you.

*Sign off temporarily and give the list a little time to regain its composure.

*If it is just too many messages, good, bad and otherwise:  subscribe to digest for awhile.

* If you really donąt want any e-mail, for this list you can just dig through the archives periodically.

*Privately e-mail people who you think are doing something inappropriate.  Or ask the list owner to speak with them.  This is much more civilized than flaming them on the list.  

*Publicly flaming people on the list is just bad Karma, donąt do it......

*Never say anything on a list that you wouldnąt say to a personąs face, loudly and in a large room of people.  I think we sometimes forget that people on e-mail have feelings.  

*Come up with such an exciting new topic that people forget about what they were annoyed about in the first place.

The 2 options that should be used only as last resorts:

*Sign off permanently:  Donąt do it!  Weąd miss you.

*Make a post to the list complaining about all of the annoying posts.  Guaranteed to make the problem worse before it gets better.

                Thanks for reading my big post   --Dan
--
Katja Hrones & Dan Butterworth
96 Oregon Road
Ashland, MA 01721

lorax2@geocities.com
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