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Location

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Date Posted

Eastern Pennsylvania

How long does everyone suppose a secondary can get before its tip is no longer contributing to the growth of the pumpkin pollinated on the main. 20ft? 25ft? Unlimited?

7/1/2019 12:12:27 PM

Westmoreland, KS

I'm going with unlimited. I think you could test it by letting the secondaries grow and see if they slow down once the pumpkin kicks it into high gear.

7/1/2019 12:53:48 PM

Colorado

It might change relative to how far the secondary is from from the pumpkin. 15 ft secondaries thats 10 feet down the main from the fruit has 25 ft of vine between its tip and the pumpkin .

7/1/2019 3:22:18 PM

Colorado

Orangeneck that is" the question".It seems like 15 ft is the current heavy hitter favorite lenght but who knows.Its either helping the pumpkin or hurting the pumpkin resource wise.your guess is as good as mine

7/1/2019 3:28:18 PM

Simi valley, ca

steves plant pattern were huge , look them up! Quite interesting !!!

7/1/2019 5:39:01 PM

Eastern Pennsylvania

I had to cut at least 10 feet of main and go with a female on the 6th secondary so this is of particular interest to me this season. I’ve been thinking about the details that you mentioned about total distance cojoe. Like, instead of a 20 ft secondary with no tertiary vines, you do a 15 foot secondary and let 3 or 4 tertiary vines spider out, thus giving yourself 15 extra vine feet all of which is equidistant from the pumpkin. I am going to do this where space allows, which I have since I removed 150 sq ft of plant due to chemical damage (unknown origin). I plan to use about 20 ft as my mark, letting several tertiaries go out of it around the 15 ft mark. I need to take 6 secondaries on each side of the plant for a current total of around 250 sq ft and get to around 600.

7/2/2019 9:33:28 AM

Midway, UT

To add to what Joe said, it seems like the leaves close to the stump seem to be less connected to the pumpkin then the ones closest to the pumpkin. It might just be because of age, but the leaves farthest from the pumpkin are much bigger, don't necessarily flag when leaves close to the pumpkin flag and the like. So my thought is that they contribute less possibly because they are farther from the sink, but this is just through observation and not really any science.

7/3/2019 4:48:29 PM

Grittyville, WA

Great question. Correct me if this sounds wrong: Assuming the grower has plenty of space, water, and fertilizer, I cant think of any drawbacks to even larger plants except blowing up the stump. Which some growers are able to do under good growing conditions. Am I correct in my thinking...

7/3/2019 9:12:45 PM

Ham Lake, Minnesota

Proof you can grow 700 pound pumpkin in a patch 7 feet wide and 15 feet long and this was 10 years ago on the 904 stelts seed:

http://www.bigpumpkins.com/Diary/DiaryViewOne.asp?eid=121043

So three foot secondaries on each side can do wonders! I'm thinking 12-15 foot secondaries are best? Once they get longer than that, they almost start to become their own thing and not helping the cause.

7/9/2019 1:35:31 PM