Growing Doomsday Pumpkin Seeds
This page talks about growing doomsday pumpkin seeds. It tells you how many pumpkins you need for one person per year if pumpkins were all you had to eat.
We are changing our figures to 2000 calories. Some of the pages talk about 1200 calories. This may be a bit lean for survival living. 2000 may be a bit lean if you are out working hard in the garden each day.
Pumpkins are a versatile vegetable and you can make sweet and savory dishes with pumpkins. Save & eat some of the seeds as a salty roasted snack.Usually we talk about growing off color vegetables. Off color meaning the colors you do not find in the store.
When growing doomsday pumpkin seeds, pumpkins are a bit different since all colors can be found in a store.
But let's assume that a scavenger will think that a white pumpkin has a disease and will not touch it since most of the pumpkins they come in contact with are orange.
We will want to grow some orange pumpkins and some white ones. There are also green, brown, and black pumpkins which are also good to grow. Hopefully scavengers will leave the off colored ones alone and only take the orange.
The best medium sized orange pumpkin to grow is the New England Pie. It's meat is good for baking and its seeds are good for roasting and eating. You can also press the oil out of the pumpkin seeds to make pumpkin oil.
The best white is Valenciano. It is about twice the size of New England Pie. It has all of the same benefits as New England only it is about twice the size which means more meat. White pumpkins do not produce white meat. It is still orange.
Depending on the size, type and storing conditions, a pumpkin will last anywhere from two to six months on the shelf as long as no part of the inside flesh is exposed. Once it is exposed to air, it will quickly go bad.
One New England Pie pumpkin will produce about one cup of mashed flesh to eat.
Prepare Doomsday Pumpkin for Eating
Pumpkin has to be prepared before it can be used for eating. You can eat it raw but make sure you remove the skin and seeds and fibrous material found in the pumpkin.
How to make pumpkin puree?
To prepare cut your pumpkin up into about 4 to 6 slices. Or some will cut it in half. Whatever works best for you. You can preheat your field oven to a high temperature.
Clean the seeds and membrane out. Seeds can be roasted for eating, or give the whole mess to the chickens.
Bake in the field oven at until the flesh is tender enough to be pierced much like a potato. Once this is done, let the pieces cool to the touch, then scrape out the flesh. Put in a bowl and work it until it is smooth and has a creamy texture. This will take some effort since you will not have a food processor.
Then you will need some way to drain the water off of it and make it into a paste. You will probably want to experiment with modern kitchen appliances and then with your doomsday tools.
My wife cuts the pumpkins in half, scoops out all of the seeds and goop
and then roasts them at 400° Fahrenheit for about an hour. Then she
cools them and scoops the flesh out.She then puts it in a blender. You can prepare by getting a manual hand mixer now before there is a disaster. Add a small amount of water if it gets too thick to process.
The key to successful living in a doomsday event is to practice before hand.
By this time you may be thinking to yourself, "How did they make pumpkin pie at the first Thanksgiving? The answer is they did not have pumpkin pie at the first Thanksgiving meal even though I have seen pictures and articles to the contrary. Read this Article to see what was served at the first Thanksgiving meal.
Maybe we can get some good ideas on what to grow for a doomsday event.
How Many Growing Doomsday Pumpkin Seeds Do You Need?
The first step is to figure how many pumpkins we will need. Eating them uncooked will require less than making the puree to eat. So you would think. But prepared pumpkin meat actually has more calories in it than raw.
Pumpkin is low in calories. One cup yields about 30 calories for uncooked and about 50 calories for prepared depending on the how well the prep turns out. But it is high in fiber. The trade off for caloric intake will be the fiber intake.
Using the White Valenciano as our base pumpkin, we can get about 4 cups of raw pumpkin from a Valenciano pumpkin which will make about 3 to 4 cups of puree. The exact depends on water ration, largeness and quality of the pumpkin.
To get the best measurement, grow some and prepare the puree. It will never be exact but you should be able to get close to figuring out how many to plant.
We will base our figures on the 30 calorie count for one person for one year consuming about 2000 calories a day. 2000 divided by 30 is about 67 cups a day of just eating pumpkin for calories. Probably much less when you add the fiber count.
One Valenciano pumpkin will have about 4 cups a pumpkin. 67 divided by 4 is 17 pumpkins a day.
That is a lot of pumpkin. Hopefully you will have more than pumpkin to eat.
You would need about 6500 pumpkins in a year.
One Valenciano plant will produce about 4 to 6 pumpkins a year. This is a conservative number.
You will need 1,625 plants per year. A pumpkin will produce about 300 seeds per pumpkin. You will need about 6 but we will say 10 more plants for seed, And 10 more plants for seed for trading, bartering and emergencies.
You will need to grow about 1650 plants per year.
You will want to stagger your planting so they do not all ripen at the same time.They have a long shelf life. Depending on your storage options, they can last up to six months.
Pumpkins will grow in the heat and will handle a couple of mild frosts above 30 degrees.
You will not want to plant the same vegetable/fruit each year but will need to practice Crop Rotation.
Growing Doomsday Pumpkin Seeds
Pumpkin is a full sun winter squash that thrives in the heat, trailing and vining just like a gourd or cucumber.
Because of the speed of growth, not much is accomplished by creating transplants to plant out. I would plant pumpkin seeds directly into the soil when temperatures have warmed.
Remember we are planting for survival not Halloween. Plant early and keep planting about every two weeks.
You will need about 1/2 acre of land to produce the pumpkins. I would plant white and orange together. Hopefully scavengers will take the orange and leave the white.
Plant seeds about 1 inch deep. No deeper. Read our article on Steps of Seed Germination to find out why, how much to water and lots of other good information.
After planting I would soak the top half of the soil with the pepper repellent you have made from Ghost, Reaper or some other hot pepper to keep bugs away. The only other solution is to check each day and hand kill the bugs. Remember you will not have any insecticides. We talk about these bugs on our Growing Squash page.
You can treat powdery mildew without fungicides using home remedies like baking soda, milk, vinegar, and neem oil. But you probably will not have any of these things available.
You can try making vinegar. I did but it did not turn out well.
The other thing is to cut the leaves off that are infected as soon as you see them. But trying to watch over 1/2 acre of pumpkins may turn out to be impossible.
You will have to decide whether it is worth it to grow pumpkin. Maybe just a few for variety.
You will need to put together a growing manual with all these tips and whatever else you can find on the internet. Take notes when you experiment with growing a garden. I hope to add a seed saving page when we are through with the vegetable, herb and flower pages.
Make four or five copies of your manual. Hide in various places. Put each page in its own sheet protector.
Follow our rule of thirds for growing doomsday pumpkin seeds.
You can survive a doomsday event, unless it what is called the "Rapture" which is the second coming of Jesus. You can read about this in the Bible's book of Revelation. I am fairly certain that I don't want to be around after this happens.
Put down the TV remote and game console. And get busy gardening!
Go to Doomsday Seed Index from Growing Doomsday Pumpkin Seeds
Since 2009, over 1,500,000 home gardeners, all across the United States of America, have relied on David's Garden Seeds® to grow beautiful gardens. Trust is at the heart of it. Our customers know David's Garden Seeds® stocks only the highest quality seeds available. Our mission is to become your lifetime supplier of quality seeds. It isn't just to serve you once; we want to earn your trust as your primary supplier of seeds.
Heirloom Seeds
Scan the QR code to visit our web store where we have 100's of varieties of seeds..
You will find the finest heirloom seeds, the freshest, always Non-GMO at David's Garden Seeds®
Come by our Farm Store Mon-Fri from 9am-5pm and Sat 10am-2pm.
Located at
5029 FM 2504
in Rossville, TX near Poteet, TX. Located 40 minutes from downtown San Antonio, Texas