A bit late with your pumpkin sowing and wondering if you can plant them now? Can you plant pumpkins in July? Let’s have a look and find out.
Can You Plant Pumpkins In July?
If you are planting your pumpkins in July then you will want to do everything possible to get them off to a strong start. You need them to grow quickly if you want a good harvest before the first frosts arrive.
How To Sow Pumpkins For The Best Start
To get your pumpkin seedlings off to the best start you will want to sow them undercover, even in July. I would start them off in a root trainer in a greenhouse.
A root trainer just allows you to transplant your pumpkins without causing any damage at all to their roots. This is essential for getting them to grow quickly, you don’t want them to have to waste time regrowing their roots from damage caused by transplanting them.
As soon as they are well-developed plants you want to get them into the ground.
You then want to grow them in a really rich and fertile spot. Add plenty of fresh compost if there isn’t lots there already.
We want these pumpkins to grow really fast so we are going to give them every advantage possible. Make sure you dig plenty of compost into the hole that you are planting them in.
Once they are established you want to feed them regularly, again this is to get them growing as quickly as possible. Feed them once a week and make sure you keep them well-watered.
The reason for all this haste is that as soon as the first frosts of the year arrive in autumn your pumpkins will die off, along with any pumpkins on them.
If you want to get any decent size of pumpkin off your plants then you need them to get going fast.
With late pumpkins, you need to do some manual pollination. There are a lot fewer pollinators around at this time of year which can lead to your pumpkins never setting fruit.
We don’t want to lose any pumpkins to poor pollination, especially when we are already up against it time-wise, so manual pollination is a good idea.
Use a paintbrush to manually move pollen from flower to flower to get them pollinated, if possible do this across different plants.