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Hi,

I've been growing a Marina de Chiogga pumpkin. To ensure the fruits were pollinated I hand pollinated the female flowers with male flowers. Two pumpkins are doing really well. The rest started going yellow and then mushy shortly after flowering. Then I noticed some of the tiny fruits were going yellow before they flowered. The rest of the plant looks healthy so I'm not sure why. Any ideas????

Sounds like a stress reaction causing the vine to abort its fruits. Does it need more water? Is it unusually hot there? Is there sawdust coming out of the vine anywhere? Those would be my best guesses.

I wish it was hot! Nope been peeing it down with rain here in the uk. Maybe that's what is causing the stress.

could be end rot - try adding calcium to the soil aswel

There's not been the sun or heat that pumkins and squash need this summer, ours have been much the same. On most of out pumpkin/squash plants the only fruit that's set has done so only recently and far too late to ripen. We're only picking summer squash now that we had hoped to have been picking a couple of months ago.

When it's wet I usually pick-off the flower from fruit that's set, otherwise it tends to act as a magnet for rot.

Out of curiosity, did anyone else grow butternut squash this year? I'm just interested to learn about how they yielded. My ten plants gave me about 60kg of fruit, the best I've ever had.

The Riff-Raff Element wrote:Out of curiosity, did anyone else grow butternut squash this year? I'm just interested to learn about how they yielded. My ten plants gave me about 60kg of fruit, the best I've ever had.

I tried.. we haven't had one (from about six plants). Very late fruit set as there just hasn't been a summer to speak of. There's a few now, but as they're only a couple of inches long and I've already had my first IFTT frost warning of the year I don't think there's much chance of them coming to anything.

I've only seen one allotment plot on our site with a decent pumpkin harvest this year, normally there's a lot of us try them. I'm not sure what he's done differently to the rest of us.

The butternut in my greenhouse produced one reasonable-sized fruit this year, but it's not really properly ripe yet and the frost is setting in...

We've got butternut squash. Its been really dry here so all the veg have looked all scraggly from not getting enough water. However, all our pumpkins are massive! Im not sure how many you're supposed to get per plant but i think we've just got 1 per plant, its kind of hard to tell though. But all of the butternut squashes are big and the other round varieties some of them have growen humungus! Will be making lots of roast pumpkin and spicey pumpkin soup this winter. We are very pleases, we were worrying we'd not have enough food to last us through the year. And we might be loosing our tennent in the appartment which means we'd have to wait till next september to get students in. That rent pays our food bills for things like oil, sugar ect we cant produce ourselves, we're screwed if we loose it. Would have to look for a proper job

In London, the pumpkins have done reasonably well this year despite the cold and wet spring/early summer, but the butternuts have struggled producing about 6 small fruits from 4 plants. I find butternuts, despite choosing varieties supposedly suitable for the English climate, rarely do well except in very warm summers. As the OH has asked to cut down on tomatoes (I don't eat them and she has been told to reduce them as she has arthritis) so with the space, I'm going to try the butternuts in the polytunnel next year.
Incidentally our tomatoes were very late this year, cucumbers did famously, but the melons really didn't produce anything to speak of.

Ive got two that seem to be surviving but nowhere near 60kg!