How to grow pumpkins in your urban home

I didn't know that pumpkins are so easy to grow until I really grew one in my urban home! I managed to harvest a pumpkin, made pumpkin pasta and pumpkin bread, then planted the new seeds and gave boxes of pumpkin seedings away to others. It is very satisfying to know that one pumpkin I bought from the market has led to generations to new pumpkin plants. See how this all happened!

Pumpkin 1.0 from wet market

I prefer to buy my fresh veggies and fruits from the wet market to minimise the use of plastics. I love to bring my shopping bags and ride bicycle there, and mingle with the nice aunties and uncles. When I have time I will show you how I made the net bag from strings (middle picture).

From seeds to plants

About half a year ago, I bought a nice pumpkin and decided to just throw the pumpkin seeds into my planter box to see what happens. A few days later, the pumpkin seedings just popped up. One thing led to another, I ended up with very very dense pumpkin plants.

The girl worth waiting for...

The leaves kept crawling up my fence, and they kept growing and getting bigger. Everyday new leaves appeared and lots of old leaves withered off. Then one day a flower popped up, and about a week later the whole planter box was full of flowers, they even spread out to my neighbour's home. One afternoon I noticed a strange flower that has a round belly! Finally, a female flower has grown.

The romance

Pumpkin pollination is very interesting. First, lots of male flowers will appear before a few female flowers appear. Each female flower only has about 6-8 hours of window of opportunity to be successfully pollinated. So I took the opportunity to pollinate the flower by hand because I didn't see any bees around.

The baby

I ended up with just one baby in my pot, mainly because I didn't fertilise the soil enough, and I also missed the opportunity to pollinate the other female flowers. (That's why we need to make sure we protect the bees population. Without bees, fruits and veggies production are not able to meet our demands). See how my pumpkin baby grew, it became too heavy for the stem so I weaved a net to hold it.

Meet Pumpkin 2.0

First I planted the seeds again, they have grown into nice seedings and I gave them away to friends (look forward to the 3rd gen pumpkin). Then I made it into pumpkin pasta and pumpkin bread.

Click here to see my homemade pumpkin pasta recipe.

Click here to see my no-bake pan-fried pumpkin bread recipe

All from this home grown Pumpkin 2.0~!