Knowing how many pumpkins you can expect from each pumpkin seed before planting is crucial to ensuring success. Keeping track of your pumpkin’s growth and number can also help you determine which varieties are best suited for your growing conditions.
How Many Pumpkins Per Plant?
This depends on the variety grown, a giant pumpkin is normally limited to 1 pumpkin per plant but a regular-sized pumpkin can have 3 or 4 pumpkins per plant.
A regular-sized pumpkin like a Howden (a very popular variety in the UK) can produce around 3-4 good-sized pumpkins per plant. This is also the perfect Jack-O-Lantern-sized pumpkin.
Limit The Number Of Pumpkins Per Plant
Pumpkin vines need a lot of energy to produce fruit. This energy comes from the sun and food in the form of nutrition in the soil, fertilizers, and water. The more pumpkins each plant produces, the more food and drink it requires.
There is always a limit to how much any single plant can produce, this is as true for a tomato plant as it is for a pumpkin vine.
By limiting the number to three or four pumpkins per plant (if growing a regular-sized pumpkin), you can be sure that each pumpkin gets all the nutrients it needs instead of having to share with many others. As a result, the size of each pumpkin increases.
How To Stop Your Plant from Producing Too Many Pumpkins
So we now know that limiting the number of pumpkins per plant is a good idea, but how exactly do we go about doing this? Luckily for us, it is really straightforward.
The easiest way is to just remove the flowers and undeveloped fruit before they start to swell. This can be done by simply snipping the stem off with scissors or secateurs.
This is the easiest way but not the best, if we really want to maximise our pumpkins then we should also be removing side shoots, also known as tertiary vines.
These vines will otherwise keep growing and trying to develop new pumpkins, we don’t want that as it is wasted energy that should be going into developing the fruit.
What I like to do is allow a few fruits to set and then select which ones I am going to grow on. This is usually the healthiest looking ones but they can also be the ones that are simply in the best position.
Once I have picked the pumpkins I will grow on to harvest I remove the others and also pinch out the growing tips of all the vines to try and stop the plant from growing.
Now pumpkin plants love to grow, so they will develop fresh shoots, just keep an eye on these and keep regularly cutting them off when you get a chance.