RE: Why do you have to hand pollinate a pumpkin? Please address these questions.

OK PF I'll take a crack at a few of these.  1.  Maybe.  2. Carefully  3.
Not now, maybe not at all.
You want more detail?  1.  Your soil test will give you the answer to
this one.  How are the N-P-K levels?  They stand for Nitrogen,
Phosphorus and Potassium.  A nice easy general way to remember what they
do is think of them as
Up-Down-All around.  Nitrogen will help promote leaf and vine growth,
what we see up above the ground.  Phosporus helps promote root growth
and flower formation,  and Potassium  helps with overall vigor and fruit
growth. After fruit set a fertilizer that has a higher K number will
help promote growth of the pumpkins.  At that point we are not as
concerned with pushing for continued vine and root growth.
2.  If the female flower stems come off the vine at a 90 degree angle
you are very lucky.  I have now had 2 like that finally in my third year
of growing.  Most seem to come off at about 15 to 45 degrees for me.  If
you don't want your pumpkins picking themselves off the vine you need to
slowly move it away from the vine toward a 90 degree angle to the vine.
This is best done over a course of days to weeks starting when the fruit
is about the size of a soccer ball.  Don't try this in the morning as
the vines are more brittle after the cool overnight temperatures and
they will snap off with no warning.  I have probably pushed the upper
limits of what you can do moving mine up to an inch at a time, but not
on consecutive days.  A move of only a quarter inch is probably safer.
The reason you wait until the fruit has some size is so it doesn't just
spring back and it stays where you put it.  I move mine in the late
afternoon or early evening after work.
3.  Don't mound soil near a pollinated pumpkin unless you want it to rip
itself from the firmly anchored vine as it grows.  Mounding soil over a
vine helps the development of feeder roots from the top and bottom of
the vine at each leaf axil.  As the pumpkin grows it puts stress on the
stem and vine as it lifts the vine from the ground.  The stem is tough
but so are the roots and there are a lot more of them.  If you have
pollinated a pumpkin and it aborts or you decide to cull it later you
can always cover it with soil at that time.  You can train a vine to
curve and have the female flowers on the outside of that curve so that
as the fruit grows there is some slack in the vine.  If the feeder roots
from the vine are already anchored to the ground near a fruit you want
to keep simply cut them from the vine freeing it to raise off the ground
as the pumpkin grows.
4.  Yellow spots on leaves.  This could be a couple of things and I'm
not the best one to answer this.  It may be mosaic virus.  It could also
simply be genetic,  another possibility is deficient iron in the soil.
If the plant is healthy and otherwise growing well I wouldn't worry too
much about it.  If you think it may be iron deficiency you could
purchase a chelated iron mixture and water it in like a liquid
fertilizer and see if that doesn't take care of it.  One brand name I
know of that produces it is Alaskan fertilizers.  The specialize in fish
meal fertilizer and sell a chelated iron and magnesium mix that is a
liquid you can add to water at 1 tablespoon to the gallon.  There may be
other answers to this question though and I hope others will answer that
for you. As for adding wood ash I can't give you any answers.  I would
be leery of trying to do much mid season 
amending of the soil.  Its so easy to add things and impossible to
remove or mitigate many of them.  Good luck and I hope you get all the
answers you need.
Chris Michalec
Covington, WA

P.S.  You have been awfully quiet this season Duncan, this is
uncharacteristic.  Are there potential monsters lurking in the suburbs
of Federal Way?  I saw you at the Sea-Tac Mall on the morning of the
rose show but I didn't have time to talk as I was placing some last
minute entries.  How about an update?

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Pumpkin Flower [SMTP:PUMPKNFLOWR@email.msn.com]
> Sent:	Tuesday, July 07, 1998 11:24 AM
> To:	pumpkins@mallorn.com
> Subject:	Re: Why do you have to hand pollinate a pumpkin? Please
> address these questions.
> 
> 1 .Should I change my fertilizer program now after I pollinated the
> pumpkin?
> 
> 2. How can I train the female flower stem to be 90 degrees
> 
> 3. Should I mound my soil near a pollinated pumpkin?
> 
> Hi,
>   I would like to hear the answers to these three questions if any one
> has
> time to answer
> 
> Also if anyone can advise me what else to do about the gold spots on
> my
> pumpkin leaves I would apreciate any input, Have done alot of reading
> this
> week end and have found no new clues. I feel it is probly caused by
> something burning the leaves , that came in my new soil.  got a PH
> test kit
> at the garden center today and will check that also.I was thinking of
> adding
> wood ash to a section of soil to see if it would help .
> Thanks all,
> Pumpkin Flower
> 
> 
> 
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