LET'S GROW A PUMPKIN / EPISODE 1 / SOWING YOUR SEEDS

Hello everyone and welcome to the first episode of Let's Grow a Pumpkin. So my name is Emma, these are my allotment diaries and in these videos that I'm going to be putting up probably once every month or once every couple of weeks maybe, we'll see how it goes, I'm going to be showing you how you can grow a pumpkin but more than that your very own pumpkin archway. Hello my name is Emma and last year at my allotment plot I grew the most incredible pumpkin archway. This year during my new YouTube series Let's Grow a Pumpkin I'm going to be sharing everything I know about growing your very own pumpkin archway so hopefully you can follow along at home and do the same. Now a little bit of a disclaimer before I start and go into this video I'm not an actual growing expert and I'm not a gardening expert and I'm definitely not a pumpkin expert. My first attempt at growing a pumpkin archway was a complete disaster because I used the wrong pumpkins and they were just massive massive Halloween ones which just did not hold up on the archway and they didn't want to climb. The following year I sort of got my act together and I did a bit of research and I started growing smaller varieties of squash and pumpkin and I managed to grow myself a pretty impressive looking pumpkin arch which gave me so much harvest like so many pumpkins, too many pumpkins maybe. So now I'm going to show you exactly what I did, how I'm doing it this year, so if it goes right we'll all end up with beautiful pumpkin archways and if it goes wrong we'll all end up crying. So the first thing to do when we're doing a pumpkin arch is the end of March now for me in London and I'm going to start sowing my pumpkin seeds. Pretty obvious really isn't it? I am planting baby boo which are these beautiful little white ones, jack be little which are little orange ones. This year I'm also going to try some patty pan, some bukkake curry which I've heard tastes very delicious, it's kind of got like a nutty flavour to it so I'm going to try this one too. I've heard it's also quite a good climber. Do you want to start sowing your pumpkin plants about two or three weeks before the last frost date? As I live in the south of England, I live just outside of London, just south of London, my last frost date is probably about mid-April, end of April and so end of March is the perfect time for me to sow my pumpkins but depending on where you live in the country or the world just have a look at your last frost date. About three weeks before your last frost date that's when you can start sowing them at home and then they want to go out into the garden when it really gets going. Pumpkins are really hot loving plants, they do not like frost, they do not like cold night temperatures so you have to wait until we're kind of in summer so I won't plant mine out probably till like near the end of May. So sowing the end of March, planting at the end of May but like I said have a look at your specific area, you can go online there's a website to find your last frost date, just use that as a guide and let's get sowing. So normally when I'm sowing my pumpkins I will use a pot about this size, this is about a 15 centimetre pot just like that, lots of drainage holes at the bottom, here it is and the reason why I use a bigger pot is because if you plant a pumpkin plant into a small pot at some point you're going to have to transplant it, you're going to have to re-pot it before it has time to go outside, pumpkins don't like their roots to be disturbed so I usually do them in a big pot like this, however this year I've been given some products by Koya and these are little Koya pots, they're made of coconut husk and they're about the same size, I would say roughly roughly around the same size, the good thing about these is that the roots will come through and so I can plant the whole thing into the garden and not disturb the roots at all. Now my experience of pots that say they can do this isn't great and normally I have to take the plant out and put it in the garden but I will let you know how I go with these Koya products and if anything they're just really great environmentally friendly little pots, so these are what I'm using to sow all of my pumpkins this year and I'm going to do two seeds per pot. So I'm just sowing into a multi-purpose compost, peat free of course, a lot of people swear by using a potting compost but I've just never bothered, all of my seeds have almost germinated fine in a multi-purpose compost, don't forget to label your seedlings and I would actually advise doing this before you even sow them. I'm just making two holes, they're probably about half an inch deep, I'm putting two seeds per pot because I want to hedge my bets, if one of them doesn't germinate or if one of them's not strong as the other I can just rip it out and then keep my other seedling growing, so it's a little bit ruthless but it works. I realise that I'm sowing quite a few different varieties of pumpkin and squash together and I'm just kind of assuming and hoping that they'll all kind of grow together in harmony and not try and fight each other or anything and I don't really know where that assumption is coming from other than the fact that they're just all pumpkins and squashes and I just assume that they'll all get along with each other because they're the same but then I suppose it doesn't really work for humans does it or even rabbits sometimes so I don't know, I don't know where that assumption is coming from, I do hope that they will just get along. So I've never grown a kikikiri before, they're 75p, oh I've just dropped some of them out but look at the size of the seeds, absolutely massive pumpkin seeds. I thought I'd give you a little bit more context to that, these are baby boos and these are the ukikiris, wow. Right there we are, so the pumpkin seeds are planted, I'm going to put them on a sunny windowsill, wait for them to grow and like I said when they both come up I'll choose the seed that's, the seedling that's not strong and I'll just rip him out and throw him away but I'll wait for most of them to come up and hopefully most of them will germinate, if not there is still time to sow them again in mid-April or you could wait to the summer time like real summer like May, June and sow them directly into the ground. The only reason I don't like to do that is because slugs and snails absolutely love them and that's something else that we'll come on to in a later episode of Let's Grow a Pumpkin so I hope that you enjoyed this video today and I hope it was quite informative for you and if you are joining along in my little grow along, grow a pumpkin arch, now is the time to get your pumpkin seeds into their pots. I hope you enjoyed the video and I will see you in my next one, see you later, good luck!