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Devon uk

When would be the best starting date for giant Marrows, given the weigh in date of middle of October.
It's new to me as i have never grown these for weight before.

4/7/2014 3:41:58 AM

Germany

1st week of May should be fine. After pollination the marrows won´t grow for much longer than 40-45 days, which means that you could really exhaust your marrow plant by allowing it to produce some marrows one after another, and as long as the plant can continue to grow and as long as the plant is healthy (without such things like powdery mildew) that should be fine. Therefore, my suggestion is you don´t start the plant too early (because you don´t want to have an "old plant" in August/Sept.), and a plant started the 1st week of May could already produce some decent marrows in July/August. This first set of fruit will give you an impression of how they could grow (fruit development) and then in the first weeks of August you let your plant set a couple marrows and you measure the fruit every couple days and see which of them might become the race horses (according to your experience with the first set of fruit on this plant) and after 10-15 days you cull the one or another marrow and let the big ones continue to grow even bigger. No need to have them set fruit on the main vine, some of the first strong secondaries are also very productive, and therefore it should be easy to get the plant set a good load of pollinations within few days.

4/7/2014 3:54:10 AM

Devon uk

Thank you Jorg, Nice to hear from you, I will go with that and see what i can achieve, will Pm you soon, Dave.

4/7/2014 8:13:01 AM