A Crazy Trick for Growing TONS of Pumpkins and Winter Squash 

"The pumpkins can't know they've been planted, it has to be a secret!"

This thumbnail should be your next bookcover

I threw some local peach seeds onto a compost heap next to the old smokehouse. The trees grew up out of it, 2 of them, and made the best peaches I've ever had.

I think you're absolutely right. You HAVE to make it look like an accidental planting. We had some pumpkins from a local farmer that turned into mush. Now I have two very vibrant vines growing in my back yard. Its a secret. Don't let them know you're planning anything. Just casually drop them on the ground. I bet if you say "oops" when you do it, they'll grow even faster. Wait...what did I do with those mushy pumpkins? *looks at compost* Uh, oh!

“A pumpkin ate my daughter’s garden.” -David the Good. 🤣

When accidents teach you more than any book reading could. I think it's devine intervention

Nature finds a way! A few years ago I had a black garbage can that I used for compost, with holes drilled up and down the side of it to allow air flow for the compost. I ended up with cherry tomato plants growing out of the holes on the side of the can, some of the best cherry tomatoes I've grown LOL!

I estimate by next year my husband will plant pumpkins. The first year he said no to yellow squash the next year he planted them and i asked for cucumbers he said no but this year he planted some. I asked this year for pumpkins and he said no so I'll check back on the video next year again when he plants the pumpkins. Hehe

This is why i love watching you and Charles Dowding. Compost saves pumpkin lives.

The Great Pumpkin has smiled on you David the Good!

Shhhh David, don’t let the seeds hear you, they’ll know 😳

This image is one of most homeschool things I've ever seen

My grandpa grows huge perfect tomatoes out of trash cans he filled up with grandmas leftovers and leaves he raked up. Lol.. Its Uncanny 😊

Cut your pumpkins and squash with a really long stalk they store for much longer as rot doesn’t get in to the stalk

My philosophy for growing in FL now has become "just throw a bunch of seeds out randomly every day and whatever wants to live will live, but omce it comes up, care for it" This has worked really well for what i presume to be a freak of nature poinsettia my wife got us for Christmas. It sat inside unwatered for three months because my wife in her infinite wisdom said "if it wants to live it'll live". Eventually we put its pot outside and i started watering it. It looks great! After a month or two i realized its super waterlogged and just sitting in a puddle in its red foil thing, oh no! I better remove it so there no rot. The next day its shriveled and dying. My wife days redrown it. So we do, and it's doing amazing. I planted pumpkins everywhere, they all died. Expcept for this one pumpkin that randomly came up in my front yard and its thriving. My lesson? Don't try in Florida, if things want to live they'll live.

Just dug holes in my yard because I swore you said it was successful 😂 here goes a Missouri experiment I guess! Love what you do. I found you by accident when I looked up permaculture books at the library. My whole perspective on gardening has been changed!

Best thumbnail of the year. 🤣🤣🤣

"every frame is a painting on these videos" - love it

“They can’t know that they were planted. It has to be a secret.” 🤫 🎃🌿 this is so true! Btw this thumbnail is top tier. Thanks for the great content as usual.

Compost your enemies reminded me of the film Fried Green Tomatoes😂❤❤❤❤

Much like the discovery you made, I made too with tomatoes and watermelons in particular. I planted them and didn't look at them at all for almost 6 weeks during the middle of summer. When I got back to the garden it was a jungle! The watermelons and tomatoes went wild and sprawled out everywhere. I didn't feed these plants, I didn't prune out suckers are extra runners, and I didn't have anything for them to grow on but the ground. The tomatoes and watermelons got entangled with one another. I never had so many watermelons and tomatoes in my 50+ years of gardening, doing NOTHING. The only thing they got while I was away was water from a drip line on a timer. The weeds also took over the space and entangled into my watermelons and tomatoes. It was a big gnarly beautiful mass of gorgeous produce. That one watermelon vine(Crimson Sweet) had 30 gorgeous melons mature before I had to remove the vine. The tomatoes(golden currant and roma)easily produced a couple hundred maters from two plants! I'm fortunate to have the space for letting things go wild. This season I'm experimenting again and just tossing a mix of all kinds of fruit and veggie seeds all over the ground of about 30 different kinds of veggies and fruit. Should be interesting! Love your channel and philosophy of growing food.

After years of struggling to grow chayote it’s now become a problem it came back after the winter from last year with a vengeance and is now a thick ground cover , i planted pumpkins and I’m gonna let them duke it out , may the strongest cucurbit Win!

Doing this tomorrow. My goats love pumpkin, now i have a fertility plan to turn an old horse arena into a viable garden plot

Come join the new social media platform and get the entire Plant a Food Forest the Easy Way training course - hope to see you there: www.skool.com/the-survival-gardener/ - We've already got some great discussions going! Thanks for watching. -DTG

I used a display of Pumpkins as well last fall in my compost. I now have the most beautiful pumpkin plants loaded up. They have popped up everywhere I put compost

Hit the thumbs up y'all👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

The best squash yield I ever had was volunteer butternut squash that grew out of our compost pile as a volunteer plant. This totally makes sense! Those were some really beautiful pumpkins you grew!

Thanks David, there's alot of channels out there I watch but I consider yours the best and hats of to your family as they are all involved.

Ahhh, the shirt I love... matches my retro kitchen 😍 I wonder if I accidentally spilled some pumpkin seeds under my old rabbit hutches what the results would be... the jelly melon grows up and over the tree. That'll give the ground to the pumpkins. Thinking 🤔... I might do what another comment said and as I trip and spill seeds,I'll say," oops!!!" Really loud 😅

You are David the Great! Last year we had a couple of rotting pumpkins left over from Halloween. My husband scooped them up with a shovel and plopped them into an empty corner of our garden. They took off and became a beautiful, colorful patch of blossoms! Then we moved! Now we are starting over and watching your videos again to motivate us! And, boy, is it working! Thanks and keep those crazy songs coming!😂

I’m gonna try this. It’s about two weeks late in my area to plant these, but seeds are cheap and I’ll use a big pile from the bottom my goat shed. Waste hay, pine shavings, and lots of “organic matter” from the goats. Wish me luck!

The best plants in my garden are the ones that have self seeded! God bless y'all and keep growing!

Well here I am, already having done 26 of the pumpkin pits by your reccomendation and now you drop this?

Lmao!!!😂😂. That’s exactly how my cantaloupes did last year!! Now, I can’t even get them started this year! But this is 1st year for Pumpkin & no luck so far, so thank you & God bless you & family ❤

LOL...My hops do this to me every year...They're crazy critters! They cover my chicken & piggy atriums & provide wonderful shade, & the deer don't like them, so I took rogue shoots & ran them up & across my garden fencings...Awesome...and pretty. Thanks for the update...I love the vine-kids & so do all my animals.

I wish I had property and a man

Yep. We have pumpkins coming up where the kids carved them last year. 🎉

Literal life goals

This happened to me with an accidental butternut squash. They were huge too! 😊

Best cantaloupes I ever grew and the biggest , were out of compost piles. They came up on they own

Okay. I'm inspired. It's winter here in Australia. I have horses. I have tons of waste hay from winter feed. I have woodchip from where we took a tree down. Currently making a big compost ring out of chicken wire which will be filled with layers of poo, woodchip & hay that's been poo'd & pee'd all over. Might be growing pumpkins in the bush alongside my horse paddock 😁

Noticed that my pumpkin vines got along well with the strawberry plants. They started running together. It was beautiful. I'm hoping to recreate it next growing season

I made a winter vermicompost hugel "lite" trench with leftover holloween pumpkins smashed up whole and kitchen scraps. Come spring i was shocked by how many plants came up. I did it mostly for worm food, but also so id know when the compost was ready too. When you said 10 piles it made me so happy 🤣

Every seed i toss in my worm compost sprouts. When i lived in CA all my avocado pits id toss grow. Gave away dozens of avocado plants.

Thanks David, you keep making gardening fun for me :)

for fun, i planted 3 state winner giant pumpkins in a grass area, 2 germinated... they are doing alright even tho they only get 6 hrs of sun each day.... but im going to need to protect them from the rascaly squirrels and rabbits bcs its in my front yard! lets wait and see what happens!!!!

Best pumpkin plant I got grew out of the chicken manure pile. Here I was down in the garden going like crazy and failing, meanwhile one of my feathered friends ate seeds and one they pooped out sprouted and took off, damn chickens bested me at gardening, lol.

I had this tune going through my my head when you said to "plant the pumpkins on the pile".... Like the song from Drowning Pool - "PLANT THE PUMPKINS ON THE PILE... PLANT THE PUMPKINS ON THE PILE... PLANT THE PUMPKINS ON THE...... PIIIIIIIIIIILLLLLE" lol! I love your videos!

I collected a bunch of kabocha squash seeds last year, and I too am hoping to grow an absurd amount of them this year. They are so savory! Currently my favorite squash at this time.

I gotta get on here and figure out how to send pictures. My backyard is gonna be 8 up in pumpkins and gords. The same thing I threw one guard in 1 pumpkin in the compost Months ago and now everywhere I've put that compost, they have sprouted.😮 And I mean everywhere it's kinda c😊ool though (right now) it looks good

Ironically, we have a rogue pumpkin growing like crazy out of our compost heap. Usually in the fall, I go around in my truck and fill it up with bagged leaves that people rake up and put out for the trash. Almost without fail, there's at least one pumpkin mixed in from someone's Halloween display. Part of my fall prep is a layer of leaves topped off with a layer of wood chips. We almost always get rogue pumpkins in the spring time.

Mutts and Freedom! ❤ The only way to grow food in my food forrest! It is all DTGs fault as to what I have become. I am forever grateful to him.😊

Your thumbnail game is smashing! This one is a banger!!!

Do the labor and God will provide 🙏✌️

Nice shirt, David! 😊 Love your videos, they make gardening so much more fun. We live on a little Homestead in Slovenia (Europe) and I´m doing your grocery row style the second year now with big success, feeding my family is now a reachable goal..... Keep going on, dude, the world needs your wisdom in this upcoming rough times!!

Yes, i’ve had some random cucurbit plants pop up around my garden, they are the only ones to not get attacked by cucumber beattle yet. Seeds spread from last year either by compost or animals

I had some come up in my compost pile 10 yeats ago. They did great! So that is where I grow my pumkins every year since then! Squasg like growing there as well!

My best pumpkin patch was just making giant mounds of literal horsesh*t and planting straight in the top of it. Watered the mounds for two weeks until the canopy formed, then left it alone until October. Dozens and dozens of fruit, vines I could barely control, etc.

This has been my experience as well. Those pumpkins love a compost pile!

My best performing squash right now is a volunteer patty pan taking over my metal raised bed. I'm ok with that because that is where I planted Kale, you know, the green you're supposed to eat but don't really like.

The Weather has been up and down and not hot enough. So I waited a bit. Just in time to see this video and remind me to just dump a pile of compost. I have 3 winners lets see if they are winners still at the end of the season.

Had a spaghetti squash sprout out of a molded hole in the pantry 😂😂 hardened it off a few days and planted the whole thing, will see how it goes

I will adjust my pumpkin approach this year as we got stuff all the last two years in our food forest. First year we didn’t try and we got literally tons.🙃

Thanks for all the good videos, information and humor. Love the Thumbnail. 🤠

Ha, we have Kabocha growing in the same manner. We planted them last year but they all died with no fruit. And then, somehow, a seed made it's way to the compost and now we have a big bunch growing.

Those are beautiful. If you get a ton, you could sell some as stacking pumpkins.

Realised that if you dry out the leafy greens before you add them to the compost heap, it composts better

I found about 40 or so Buffalo Gourd growing around my house and down the street. Needing ideas for them lol.

I love ALL David The Good videos!

Very cool! I'm doing this tomorrow!

The vigorous ones might be from being an F1 hybrid cross that was formed and is expressing hybrid vigor, or possibly the locations but I wouldn't rule out the F1 possibility.

❤ this is so exciting and fun to look forward to 🎃

You are so flipping CREATIVE AND FUN DAVID!!!!!!!!!!!!

I LOVE YOUR GARDEN WAY!!!

See y'all on the skool community!

You are so good. Cheers.

Stealth pumpkins, I love it! Thanks❤

I love the shot of the pumpkins with the tree loppers, laying handily by. 😄

My favorite gardening channel!!! I wish you would come to Canada and bring your humor and wisdom to us cold climate gardeners.

Hello from Australia, hope we have those pumpkins here in Queensland I'm going to check it out Thank you guys🎉 Jude

I tossed pumpkin remains in my compost pile 3 yrs ago (cherokee tans) in my city yard. 32 pumpkindps on one running vine. Most went to the local food bank from this family of 2. I did nothing.

I like to spread out last years compost heap right next to where i keep it (happens to be in the shade) and i use it as a nursery, all the veggies i ate last year sprout and i move the seedlings to where i want them. Composting is amost all you have to do

Love the play on The Vetruvian Man as the thumbnail!

Pumkins are sooo exciting2 grow!!

AMEN BROTHER DAVID!

Thank You ...

From 🇦🇷 with ❤! (traveling)

Im about to cook a butternut squash. So I going to give this a shot with the seeds. so exciting!

Im growing my first commercial pumpkins this year

tyvm

"Compost your enemies" 😂 that is amazing man

I just put.mounds of horse manure in my garden bed, and going to add a bunch of molasses/chicken compost to the same bed in week or so after the pumpkins/squash are a few inches tall. Fingers crossed lol I'll probably say "whoopsie" when I add the compost just in case 😅

Oh. My. Word. I can’t believe the pumpkins are already that big! They look amazing. So awesome!

Love it 🙏😘🎃

Awesome 😍

I've been doing similar on my allotment compost heaps for a while; sadly I don't have as much space to let them run but I still get a decent yield. I'm trying it with my melons this year too -- they're marginal outdoors in this climate, but the compost heaps are still a little warm so we might still pull it off.

Excellent! I have been watching over the last couple years as my planted squash and pumpkins do ok, but all the volunteers from last year do amazingly. I think I'll try putting a mound of rabbit manure down in the middle of a grassy area and see if I can grow out of that.

Literal landrace pumpkins xD

I’m waiting

Last fall I made a quick bin out of fence and cardboard, about 3 ft diameter and 3-4 ft tall. I put leaves, manure, kitchen scraps and chicken guts. Planted 2 plants in it this year and they’re twice the size of my in ground plants!