Today I am planting giant pumpkin seeds. I will put them in 4″peat pots so that I can peel the pots away later without disturbing the roots when I transplant them. They grow really fast once they come up, so I will have to put them in the soil perhaps in 2 weeks from starting the seeds. I will transplant them once the first true leaf comes out. You can tell which way the vine will grow as it will grow in the opposite direction of the firs true leaf. This way I can place it in the soil in the direction I want it to grow. I am growing 4 giant pumpkins this year. They are: 817.9 Schieder 09, 1166 Mohr 09, 949.5 Harp 09, and the 895 Grande 08. They will go in my new pumpkin patch and I am growing another one: 352 Cabossel 09 (that’s me!) for the community pumpkin patch here in Santa Fe that I will plant when I teach a workshop May 15th. To understand what this means is the first number is the weight of the pumpkin the seed is coming from, the name is the grower’s name, and the last number is the year of the seed. So mine was a 352 lb pumpkin, my last name is Cabossel, and it was grown in 2009. That is how we giant pumpkin growers know what seed we are planting. We also look at the parents of the seeds we choose to see who they were as most of the time they come from very good “stock”. You can also just grow generic varieties that you can get from places like Amazon.com which is what I did when I started this hobby before I got serious. I grew a 225 lber from the generic variety which is fine for most people! I will try to break the state record here in NM this year. Have to beat 404 lbs…