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Entry Date
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Location
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Sunday, September 27, 2026
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cjb
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Plymouth, MN
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Entry 68 of 68 |
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As the sun sets on '26, I'm sowing the start of '28. I've noticed over the years that I tend to take a step back the year after a PB. Lots of areas to improve in 2 years. Here's a list.
1) No tillage radishes ever again.
2) Better vigilance against early plant killers (cutworms).
3) When they say you can't take summer vacations during pumpkin season, they're serious. I thought front loading travel in May to early June before vine burying got too serious would work. I just ended up falling progressively farther behind, which was really obvious with the weed abundance. Throw in a conference (even local) and a couple of unexpected work trips and I was cooked.
4) I think I'm done with drip tape. I swear it got plugged super early in the season. The stuff is so delicate it prevents the most aggressive weed control. It sucks to have to be focused on not chopping your drip when you stirrup hoe. Some kind of overhead watering, either from rain or sprinklers, is absolutely critical to get the secondary root system going. Secondaries that were buried before our drought conditions set in were more mature with better roots than everything from the second half of the season.
5) Better preventative fungicide. My OM content is too dry and my moisture meter says the water table is super high. I think this translates into super high fungicide burden. Caroline was my shot at 2K, given she had a much stronger plant. When her stump started foaming and I lost the main, GG.
6) Better secondary balance. Made this mistake a couple of years now. 2024 I grew in a modified waterfall (keeping tertiaries off the first secondaries), this year due to planting location it was more like a rigid Christmas tree (literal triangle for each plant. Combined with cutting the main at the chosen fruit, this left my late season secondaries short/underdeveloped, and Wilson stalled HARD late season.
7) Better insecticide, especially systemic. I've been doing my systemic by drip. Still had significant borer damage, so I am clearly not getting the coverage I need. Had issues with my blower/fogger early so that didn't help as both foliar insecticide and fungicide were sub-optimal the rest of the season (PM got me bad).
8) Get on top of weeds early. Going to solarize next year at the start of the season and plant a summer cover crop. Hopefully this will decrease both the pathogen burden and the number of weeds that pop in '28.
Managed to get most everything out of the patch, a quick till in, and my winter rye down. Sad to not have something for Stillwater, but Wilson wasn't noticeably growing (maybe an inch or 2 a week) and two weeks in Minnesota is the difference between having a cover crop or not. She is a pretty pumpkin but not quite HD quality. Initial strong color showing really didn't deepen into that brilliant red winners tend to have, and she ended up getting some serious growth cracks on the stem side.
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