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What the hell are my pumpkins doing?
The pumpkins matured and are just about ready to harvest with full sized, healthy pumpkins. I am simply baffled by this and haven't found anything online or in person that told me what's happened and That has only made me more curious.
Here, the leaves are all curling up at the edges. It is uniformly turned up ~0.25in around the entire leaf. The plants are otherwise healthy and it seems that this is confined to this single variety, a powdery mildew resistant hybrid and the seeds were treated against seed diseases. (If it matters, the variety was called "Gladiator Hybrid" IIRC, with 115 days for maturation, growing pumpkins weigh around 20lbs.)
This is in the lower middle of New Jersey and the seeds were sown in early to mid June. I'll be the first to admit the soil is shit. Literally shit. It's clay and shale you can make bricks with it. No loam whatsoever. To supplement this lack of loam, horse manure aged for ~7-10yrs usually gets added in to the clay. It helps, but the plot where the pumpkins were sown didn't get any this year.
To protect against borers and squash beetles the plants were treated with Cavalry insecticide, and for fungus Bravo was applied initially then once a week after a mixture of Bravo+Tanos and a mixture of Bravo+Rally were alternated every week. Application was done with a backpack sprayer to ensure the fungicide was applied to the entire plant. The application was preformed at dusk.
The only fertilizer that was applied was miracle grow via the drip irrigation.
During the growth of the plants nothing was problematic, some lower leaf yellowing and then die off but it was not that concerning.
