Pumpkin Troubles

[Yinminni]

I am into my second year in June, and I started a pumpkin patch late spring. The plant struggled but managed to grow one arm of vine out 4 blocks, flowered, and produced one pumpkin. I kinda thought that it would stay and keep producing them (but I also don't know how actual pumpkin works).

When the mother plant reaches stage 8, does it immediately die?

I have it planted on a Med. dirt, with a bunch of bonemeal, it had grow speed 109% (nutrients stayed above 50%) and I started watching it and keeping it watered.
Does too much fertilizer kill plants? 

Edited December 20, 2024 by Yinminni

[LadyWYT]

12 hours ago, Yinminni said:

Does too much fertilizer kill plants? 

To my knowledge, it does not. You are correct in that pumpkin vines will die once they reach growth stage 8. Typically they produce more than one pumpkin, and branch out a little more though. It looks like you gave the plant plenty of space here, so I'd say it's just really bad luck. You can at least turn the pumpkin back into a seed and replant though, and hope for a better crop. One thing I like to do with my pumpkin vines is keep the withered portions trimmed off. I'm not sure if that actually helps the plant or not, it's just something I do out of habit.

[Yinminni]

Thank you, I was figuring it was bad luck since from what I found it looks like 50/50 for it's rolls. I also believe that trimming the withered vines help since it can roll to maybe grow more vines in that direction, but will need more testing. I swapped out the soil to Tera petra that most everyone was saying to use; I will see how this goes.

I plan on updating this post with info I gather before marking it as solved to just help out other people who may have trouble with it.

[Streetwind]

From my testing, it seemed indeed advantageous for the mother plant's growth speed to be quite slow - meaning that fertilizing and watering it obsessively would actually reduce the overall yield.

This is because the mother plant's only job is to spawn vines around it, and when it dies, the entire plant stops being able to continue to grow. However, whether a vine itself continues growing or produces a pumpkin, that's a process done by the vines themselves. And it's completely independent of anything the mother plant does. The mother plant just has to be alive, and connected.

Therefore, the time span between the first vine spawning and the mother plant reaching stage 8 should be as long as possible in order to maximize the pumpkin yield from a single plant. It might well be ideal to plant pumpkins on the poorest soil you have access to.

of course, that will also meant that the pumpkin plant will take much longer to reach the point where it begins spawning vines in the first place, so it may not be ideal from a maximum food output perspective. But if you only found a single seed and need to raise the chances of multiplying it as much as possible? Yeah, get yourself some barren soil

 

Edited December 21, 2024 by Streetwind

[Brady_The]

10 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

From my testing, it seemed indeed advantageous for the mother plant's growth speed to be quite slow - meaning that fertilizing and watering it obsessively would actually reduce the overall yield.

Interesting.

[Yinminni]

18 hours ago, Streetwind said:

From my testing, it seemed indeed advantageous for the mother plant's growth speed to be quite slow - meaning that fertilizing and watering it obsessively would actually reduce the overall yield.

This is because the mother plant's only job is to spawn vines around it, and when it dies, the entire plant stops being able to continue to grow. However, whether a vine itself continues growing or produces a pumpkin, that's a process done by the vines themselves. And it's completely independent of anything the mother plant does. The mother plant just has to be alive, and connected.

Therefore, the time span between the first vine spawning and the mother plant reaching stage 8 should be as long as possible in order to maximize the pumpkin yield from a single plant. It might well be ideal to plant pumpkins on the poorest soil you have access to.

of course, that will also meant that the pumpkin plant will take much longer to reach the point where it begins spawning vines in the first place, so it may not be ideal from a maximum food output perspective. But if you only found a single seed and need to raise the chances of multiplying it as much as possible? Yeah, get yourself some barren soil

 

This is a good point, I will try this next and see how it goes. I switched the soil to a higher tier and it does seem to be helping. This time I was able to get 2 full pumpkins and one is growing. Also found out that if a vine (B) grows off another vine (A) but vine (A) withers, destroying vine (A) gets rid of vine (B) even through it was not withered. So may be worth leaving the withered vines if it has sprawled out from that point

It does feel like the mother plant reached stage 7 faster this time since growth was 120%
But this time, I stayed in and around my base to keep its chunk loaded. I was able to watch the vines grow and sprawl much faster. Too many changes though to really know which is affecting the plants success this time (I found 7 seeds so I have room for error)

[Streetwind]

8 hours ago, Yinminni said:

This time I was able to get 2 full pumpkins and one is growing.

Do keep in mind that pumpkins have a huge variation in output, since literally everything they do is chance-based.

When I planted four pumpkin plants in the same garden, on the same soil, at the same time in my 1.18 world, one of the plants produced 5 pumpkins, one produced 3, one produced 1, and one produced zero pumpkins. Yes, through all its lifetime, zero.

So unfortunately, comparing one plant to another is not going to allow you to deduce anything. I would wager that anything less than maybe fifty plants for each test condition you check would not be statistically significant. When I realized this, that was the point when I stopped trying to get deeper into it

[Yinminni]

13 hours ago, Streetwind said:

Do keep in mind that pumpkins have a huge variation in output, since literally everything they do is chance-based.

When I planted four pumpkin plants in the same garden, on the same soil, at the same time in my 1.18 world, one of the plants produced 5 pumpkins, one produced 3, one produced 1, and one produced zero pumpkins. Yes, through all its lifetime, zero.

So unfortunately, comparing one plant to another is not going to allow you to deduce anything. I would wager that anything less than maybe fifty plants for each test condition you check would not be statistically significant. When I realized this, that was the point when I stopped trying to get deeper into it

That's a good very good point. Maybe I will set up a testing world on a day I got no plans.
Thank you for the help!