What a Bad Year

When it comes to pumpkin growing you have your good years and your not so good years.

This season wasn’t that great for me.

I won’t bore you with details, or the woe is me things. What I will say is I did expect to do better with the frequency of blog posts, yet here we are.

What I Would / Should Have Done Differently

To help myself and anyone reading this, here is what I would or should have done better this season.

Better Patch Prep

With limited resources or money patch prep should not suffer. Sure it might take you longer, but you can do it cheaply when growing in a tiny patch in the back yard.

Overthinking it doesn’t help and you don’t need machinery. You just need to put in the hard work to it a lot better than it was.

NOTE: I will say though, if you have an injury or medical problems please don’t make things worse by doing things you shouldn’t be doing.

Better Pre Season Budgeting

Make sure you have some money on hand for basic things if they come up, these could include:

• Seeds if you are buying them
• Fert and amendments
• Watering items

NOTE: Don’t stuff up your finances though, work with what you’ve got and prioritise the truly important things in life before a giant pumpkin.

Have the Backups Backed Up

Don’t leave everything to chance. Things happen and it’s easy to suddenly be behind where you should be. Even if everything looked really good at the start.

Make the Time

We’re all busy and being pulled in many different directions on a daily basis. If you want to grow a giant pumpkin and you want to get the best results you can, no matter your skill level, budget or equipment make the time.

It’s very easy to be too tired and skip doing what you should be doing.

This is the same for making content or writing blog posts or replying to the awesome people that drop you a message. Make the time to reply, otherwise it’s been a week or two and you lose momentum.

Do the Best You Can

Even if you are limited in some way do the best you can will give you better results.

Looking to the Future

Blink and it will be time for the next growing season. I know for the Northern Hemisphere growers things are kicking off now. Will be great to see how everyone goes.

For me I have a couple of priorities:

The overall feeling I have is I can’t have a break. I need to do something with the pumpkins stuff a lot more. Otherwise my break turns into not doing anything and then things feel like a chore in 6 months time.

Here’s the couple of things I am making time for:

• Make sure the website is up to date
  • It’s been a slow grind, but I want it to to be the best it can be, especially by Oct the season start here.
• Budgeting money for the hobby
  • I was stretched for funds last season, things are a bit better now so I can save money to go towards this hobby.
• Patch prep earlier
  • I need to start the patch prep a lot earlier.
• Organising some more T-Shirts and Hats
  • Feels weird to not have my GPNZ branded gear like I used to have. Let me know if you’d be keen to buy something in the future.

Have a Great Off Season or Growing Season

Wherever you are in the world, if you’ve made it to the end of the blog post, thanks. Have a great time growing or having a break.

I’ll catch you in the next blog post.