"A pumpkin is not a house plant" they told me...
"A pumpkin is not a house plant" they told me...
We are having a pumpking growing competition at work and I live in an apartment, so I'm working with what I have 😆
The plant already produced many male flowers. From what I have read, the male flowers usually come out 10 - 14 days before the female flowers. They open up for a single day and then they close and fall off.
I found out that tey are edible, so I stuffed a few of them with some left overs as a culinary experiment.
And the first female flower has arrived!
This goes hard. Unironically if I walked into a guy's apartment and saw this my opinion of them would increase.
Growing large fruit in your apartment is very baller
If the male flower die so soon, how do the female flowers get pollinated? I never understood that part.
You might have better luck indoors than outdoors, depending on where you live. Where I live, anything squash-related planted outdoors develops powdery mildew and dies. I have planted many pumpkins and successfully harvested one. Ever. Maybe I should plant some inside.
If mildew doesn't get them, vine borers will :(
This is ridiculous and I love it. Good luck, hope you win!🍀
What's the bottle to the left? What did the flowers taste like? Sorry for so many questions this is really cool though.
The bottle is a carbon dioxide tank. It is connected to a regulator that can open/close the valve to let CO2 out. During the day it brings the CO2 level under the leaves to around 800 - 1000 parts per million (ppm). Usually the level in the air is closer to 400 - 500 ppm, and fast growing plants can grow faster with some extra CO2 in the air to build into sugars during photosynthesis. At least in theory... For me it is an experiment in CO2 regulation as I have measured and decreased CO2 levels in the past (when growing mushrooms and tempeh) but I had never actively delivered it, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn.
It turns out pumpkin flowers are very fragrant, and the odor is very pleasant, but I am not good at describing smells with words, sorry... To me it smells like a mixture of a rhododendron flower and a pumpkin. I recently went to a wedding in which they served ricotta stuffed zuccini flowers (very similar flowers) and the cook clearly knew what she was doing, in that case the zuccini flowers still had some of the fragrance and this made the dish taste very special. In my attempt I filled the flowers with some curry rice and then pan-seared them in butter, and all the fragrance went away in the process. So the flower was just a vessel with the soft texture of a petal and the taste of browned butter. I did not succeed in keeping any flower flavor. It was a quick-and-dirty experiment... I would like to learn more about cooking with flowers while keeping some flavor.
that's so awesome. i wanna copy you now haha, also in an apartment
To be fair, there's gotta be a point where this classifies as "outdoors", but that's a sweet setup
This is not to disparage or discourage OP in any way, but when (and really if) people say something like "X is not a houseplant" they absolutely don't mean you can't grow such a thing indoors at all regardless of how much equipment and effort you use. That would be stupid, and easy to counter, since indoor greenhouses are a thing as are heaters, humidifiers, air conditioners, fans, and artificial lights.
By the time you're injecting CO2 you're well past the point of what would be considered typical indoor growing conditions. Let's be honest. I think we can mostly all agree that if there actually were people who said "you can't grow X indoors", those people likely meant under standard household conditions.
There is a bit of humor and a bit of truth. I don't have a garden and so when I was looking into whether it was possible to grow a pumpkin in a pot, most of what I found stated that the pumpkins need a lot of ground to have a strong and healthy root system, and a lot of sun, and so it is not recommended to grow them indoors. I thought that the plant would begin to grow but at some point the pot would not be able to sustain the root system and the plant would die. This has happened to me with many trees that I try to grow indoors - most recently my tamarind trees. They look perfectly healthy and then drop dead. Well, I am not certain of why the trees die but I suspect their roots rot.
But the humor is that I still don't think it is a good idea to grow this plant indoors. It has taken over a lot of space! My original plan was to prune it and keep it small, but I noticed that even the farthest leaves are able to pull moisture from the pot with no problem, and so I am letting the plant grow to see what happens.
I might resort to growing my peppers and tomatoes inside this year. The slugs are everywhere end keep eating my plants, they've destroyed my aubergine and paprika plants.
I have been very succesful with indoor peppers. With tomatoes I had too much plant and a few cherry tomatoes (from a supermarket cherry tomato's seed)
Goals (for the distant future ...or maybe I delegate this task to another me in the multiverse, we'll see)