Pumpkin - Winter Vegetable

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

"Winter vegetable" Pumpkin is called not because this crop is grown in winter, but because its well-protected fruits perfectly retain their integrity, taste and healing properties until next spring, when fresh vegetable greens appear. Nature did not stint, creating a wide variety of plant species of the genus Pumpkin, giving gardeners the opportunity to choose in accordance with their preferences

The beauty and power of the plant

Spectacular and powerful plants of the genus Pumpkin, even without fruit, are a wonderful sight, delighting with their large lobed leaves, rough or coquettishly pubescent whitish hairs, firmly holding their relatively long petioles to a strong stem that creeps along the earth's surface. The picturesque leaves are complemented by white or yellow funnel-shaped flowers of impressive size. By the way, the American natives successfully used the pumpkin flowers to diversify their diet, which not every Russian gardener dares to do, preferring to wait for the red-sided fruit harvest.

The creeping stem in different species can be of different lengths, which allows gardeners to choose the type and variety of Pumpkin in proportion to the available "weave". If the size of the garden allows Pumpkin to scatter long whips on the ground without false modesty, and the fertility of the soil guarantees high-quality nutrition for such a spreading plant, then you can safely purchase seeds of varieties with the longest "mustache" stems. Among those, the most popular are such as "Zorka", "Winter Sweet", "One hundred pounds", "Volzhskaya gray", "Almond".

With the modest size of the garden plot, varieties with short stems that form a compact plant will come to the yard. Among them are the "Amazon", "Gribovskaya bush", "Freckle".

Fruit sizes and shelf life

Since pumpkin is usually grown in our country for the sake of harvesting fruits, and not for the spectacular beauty of plants, it is important to decide what result we want to get from our garden troubles.

With a large family, it is more profitable to grow a large-fruited Pumpkin. Gathered a crop of six or seven orange-sunny fruits weighing from five to twenty kilograms, consider, provided the family with Pumpkins, if not before the spring greenery, then certainly before the Nativity of Christ. To do this, it is worth stocking up on seeds of the "Rossiyanka" variety, which, in the presence of fertilized soil, gives twenty-kilogram bright orange pumpkins, which are suitable both for food and for decorating the interior of a house or apartment. Moreover, the variety is relatively early maturing. After three months, you can cook millet porridge with pumpkin or feast on pieces baked in the oven, lightly sprinkled with sugar. This variety is suitable for both central Russia and the Siberian expanses.

For those who have "less" appetite, a variety called "Healing" has been created, the pumpkins of which gain five kilograms in 95 days of life. In addition, this variety is quite cold-resistant, and therefore suitable for many Russian regions.

One of the leaders in terms of fruit storage duration is the Gribovskaya Zimnyaya variety. Such pumpkins, in favorable storage conditions, will calmly wait for the replenishment of their ranks with pumpkins of the next harvest, or even the next year. True, the harvest will have to wait almost five months, which is not suitable for any territory of our vast country.

Pumpkin nutmeg

Not so long ago, butternut pumpkin appeared on Russian beds, conquering gardeners with a high content of vitamin "A" and a more refined taste, which changes only for the better as it is stored. In addition, the Muscat pumpkin is distinguished by a wide variety of fruit shapes, and therefore is more functional. In their size, the fruits of the Muscat pumpkin are inferior to the large-fruited pumpkin, and the plants are more thermophilic, which for the time being held back interest in growing this type of pumpkin.

Among the popular varieties of Muscat pumpkin, one can note such as Prikubanskaya, Zhemchuzhina, Vitaminnaya, the names of which speak for themselves. The fruits of these varieties may well compete in weight with large-fruited pumpkin, reaching six to seven kilograms.