Pumpkin Seeds in Ireland
This page is about pumpkin seed to sow, not the bag of snack seeds in the health food aisle. Growing pumpkins from seed in Ireland means starting them warm indoors in late spring, giving them far more room and far richer soil than seems reasonable, and timing the crop so the fruit is ripe and cured before the end of October. Here are the sowing dates that work here, the varieties that actually size up in a cool Irish summer, and where to buy the seed in Ireland.
Sowing and harvest calendar for Ireland
Months shaded below are the reliable windows for Irish conditions.
Quick facts
- Botanical name
- Cucurbita pepo and Cucurbita maxima
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Hardiness
- Tender, no frost tolerance
- In Ireland
- Cloche or fleece helps
- Germination
- 5 to 10 days at 18 to 25C
- Sowing depth
- 2cm
- Spacing
- 150cm apart, 180cm between rows
- Position
- Full sun
- Containers
- Needs open ground
- Sowing to harvest
- 15 to 22 weeks
- Harvest
- September to October
Sowing depth and spacing
Drawn to scale from the figures in this guide.
How deep, seen from the side
How far apart, seen from above
The best pumpkin varieties for Irish gardens
Picked for how they perform in a cool, damp, short summer rather than for catalogue photos.
Uchiki Kuri
Open pollinated / Onion squash, small trailing
The most reliable pumpkin for Irish conditions, and the one to choose if you only have room for a single plant.
Growing notes and stockistsCrown Prince F1
AGMF1 hybrid / Winter squash, large trailing
Grow this one to eat. The flavour is in a different class and a cured fruit will still be good next spring.
Growing notes and stockistsJack of All Trades F1
F1 hybrid / Carving pumpkin, trailing
The carving pumpkin to grow if you want a proper orange lantern for Halloween rather than something to eat.
Growing notes and stockistsAtlantic Giant
Open pollinated / Giant exhibition, very large trailing
The one to grow if the goal is size rather than dinner. Enormous fun, enormous space, and a lot of feeding.
Growing notes and stockistsHow to sow pumpkin seeds
Sow one seed per 9cm pot of ordinary multipurpose compost, pushed in about 2cm deep and set on its edge rather than flat. The flat-sown seed sits in a small puddle of water in the compost and rots, and in a cool Irish April that happens more often than it should.
Pumpkins want real warmth to germinate, somewhere between 18 and 25C. A heated propagator, an airing cupboard or the top of a fridge all work, and at that temperature the seedlings break the surface in five to ten days. A cold windowsill in a hall gives you nothing but mouldy compost.
The moment the loop of stem appears, move the pot into the brightest place you have. Pumpkin seedlings stretch quickly and a leggy one is much harder to plant firmly later. Keep them just moist, never sodden, and pot on into a 1 litre pot if the roots fill the first pot before the weather is ready.
Harden the plants off over a week to ten days before they go out. They are fully tender, so a single late frost or even a cold windy fortnight will check them badly.
Growing on in Irish conditions
Pumpkins are gross feeders, and this is the part people underdo. Dig a hole a spade deep and fill it with well-rotted manure or half-finished compost before planting, or simply plant straight into the compost heap, which is warm, rich, free-draining and out of the way. Irish gardeners have been doing that for generations and it is still the single best pumpkin site in most gardens.
Choose the most sheltered sunny spot you have. Wind shreds the big soft leaves and cools the ground, and a pumpkin that spends June being battered will never catch up. A low hedge, a wall or even a temporary windbreak of netting on stakes makes a visible difference.
Water generously and consistently once the plants are growing away, aiming the can at the soil around the base rather than over the leaves. From the point the first fruit starts to swell, a weekly high potash feed, the same one you would use for tomatoes, helps the fruit fill rather than the plant simply making more leaf.
Once you have the number of fruit you want, take out the growing tips beyond them in early August. Everything set after the start of August in Ireland is a passenger: it will not ripen, and it takes sugar that should be going into the fruit you are keeping.
Slide a slate or tile under each pumpkin as it swells, and in September pull away any leaves lying directly across the fruit so the skin sees whatever sun turns up.
Harvesting, curing and storing
A pumpkin is ready when the skin has taken its full colour, the stalk has started to dry and crack, and your thumbnail no longer marks the skin easily. In most Irish gardens that is late September into October.
Cut it with secateurs leaving a good long stalk, five to ten centimetres, and carry it by the fruit rather than the handle. A stalk that snaps out leaves an open wound and the pumpkin will rot from there within weeks.
Then cure it, which is the step that separates a pumpkin that keeps from one that does not. Ten days to two weeks in warm dry air hardens the skin and seals the cut. In an Irish October that is unlikely to happen outdoors, so use a greenhouse, a polytunnel, a sunny porch or a warm room indoors. Turn the fruit occasionally so every side dries.
Store cured fruit somewhere cool, dry and frost free, ideally around 10 to 15C, spaced out so they are not touching, and check them over every few weeks. A cold damp shed will undo all the curing, so a spare bedroom or the top of a wardrobe genuinely works better.
What goes wrong with pumpkins in Ireland
Powdery mildew
Signs: White dusty patches on the upper leaf surface from midsummer, spreading until the whole plant looks floured and the leaves die back.
What to do: Almost universal on Irish pumpkins by August and rarely fatal on its own, but it shortens the ripening window at exactly the wrong moment. Water the soil rather than the leaves, keep plants apart so air moves between them, and remove the worst leaves rather than stripping the plant bare, since the fruit still needs some canopy. Feeding and watering steadily matters more than spraying.
Slugs on young plants
Signs: A newly planted pumpkin reduced to a chewed stub overnight, or seedling stems eaten through at soil level.
What to do: Young cucurbits are among the most slug-attractive things in an Irish garden and a plant lost in June cannot be replaced in time. Plant out into a cut-off plastic bottle collar, go out with a torch on the first three damp evenings, and hold plants back in 9cm pots until they have four or five rough true leaves rather than planting tiny ones.
Flowers but no fruit
Signs: Plenty of flowers open and drop, or tiny fruit start to swell then yellow, shrivel and rot at the tip.
What to do: Pumpkins carry separate male and female flowers, and cool wet weather keeps bees indoors just when the first females open. Hand pollinate: pick a freshly open male, strip the petals off, and dab the pollen onto the centre of a female, which is the one with a miniature pumpkin behind the flower. Do it before midday while the pollen is fresh.
Fruit rotting underneath
Signs: A soft brown patch where the pumpkin sits on wet soil, sometimes with the whole fruit collapsing after heavy rain.
What to do: Irish ground stays wet from September on, so slide a slate, tile or piece of timber under each fruit as soon as it is big enough to lift. This also warms the fruit slightly and keeps slugs from grazing the underside.
Fruit stays green and small
Signs: Late October and the pumpkins are the size of a grapefruit, still pale, with the plant still trying to set more.
What to do: Usually too many fruit for the season length, or a sowing made too late. Limit each plant to two or three fruit on the smaller varieties and one on a giant, pinching out the growing tips beyond the last fruit you want in early August. Remove leaves directly shading the fruit in September so what sun there is reaches the skin.
Where to buy pumpkin seeds in Ireland
Irish suppliers that stock this, so postage stays domestic and seed arrives in time to sow. These are plain links, not paid placements.
Order online
- Brown Envelope Seeds Irish Organic seed grown and saved in West Cork, so already adapted to Irish conditions Grows and saves its own certified organic seed in West Cork, so the varieties are already adapted to Irish conditions. Visit Brown Envelope Seeds , Co. Cork
- Quickcrop Irish Sowing and harvest months listed on every packet, ships across Ireland Ballymote based, lists sowing and harvest months per product and ships across Ireland. Visit Quickcrop , Co. Sligo
- Fruit Hill Farm Irish Certified organic and biodynamic seed, mail order from Bantry Bantry based supplier to Ireland's commercial organic growers. Certified organic and biodynamic seed, mail order only. Visit Fruit Hill Farm , Co. Cork
- Seedaholic Irish Heirloom pumpkin and winter squash with unusually detailed packet notes Family run in Clonbur since 2005, deep heirloom range with detailed growing notes on every packet. Visit Seedaholic , Co. Galway
Garden centres and mixed retailers
- Mr Middleton Irish The familiar named carving and squash varieties, posted from Dublin Mail order arm of a long established Mary Street shop, carries the familiar named varieties the organic specialists skip. Visit Mr Middleton , Co. Dublin
- The Organic Centre Irish Organic seed catalogue from Rossinver, Co. Leitrim Registered Irish charity at Rossinver with a 19 acre demonstration garden behind the seed catalogue. Visit The Organic Centre , Co. Leitrim
Common questions
When should I sow pumpkin seeds in Ireland?
Late April is the sweet spot for most of the country, with early May fine and sometimes better. Sowing in March feels productive but produces a large root-bound plant weeks before it is safe to put outside, and a checked pumpkin never really recovers. Work back from your last frost: plants go out from late May on the south and east coasts, and early to mid June inland and in the north west, so you want a sowing date roughly four weeks before that.
Can I sow seeds from a supermarket pumpkin or a packet of eating seeds?
Seeds scooped from a ripe supermarket pumpkin will often germinate, but almost all shop pumpkins are F1 hybrids, so the plants come out as an unpredictable mix and rarely resemble the parent. Packets sold in the food aisle are a different matter, though not for the reason usually given. Snack pepitas mostly come from naked seeded Styrian pumpkins whose seed is perfectly alive; what kills it is the roasting, salting or heat treatment applied for storage. Raw untreated snack seed will sometimes grow, but you have no way of knowing which packet was heated and no idea what variety you are getting. If you want a specific pumpkin in October, buy seed sold for sowing.
Will my pumpkin be ready in time for Halloween?
Only if you sow in April or very early May and grow the plant hard through the summer. Halloween is late in the Irish pumpkin season rather than the middle of it, so a June sowing will still be swelling green fruit when you need them orange. If the fruit has coloured by early October, cut it and cure it, then keep it indoors somewhere cool until the end of the month. A carved pumpkin only lasts a few days once cut, so carve on the day or the day before.
How much space does one pumpkin plant need?
More than almost anyone allows. A standard carving variety wants around 1.5m each way and will still run trailing stems well beyond that, and a giant type needs several metres. If space is tight, grow a small-fruited variety like Uchiki Kuri, train the trailing stems in a spiral around the plant rather than letting them wander, or do what Irish gardeners have always done and plant one on the compost heap where it can sprawl over ground you were not using anyway.
Do I need a polytunnel to grow pumpkins in Ireland?
No, and it is usually a waste of tunnel space, since a single plant will fill a large chunk of it for the entire summer. Pumpkins are grown outdoors here perfectly well. A tunnel or greenhouse earns its keep at the two ends of the season instead: raising the young plants in April and May, and drying and curing the cut fruit in October when the weather outside is against you.
How long will a pumpkin keep after harvest?
It depends entirely on the variety and on whether it was cured. Carving types such as Jack of All Trades are bred for looks and often go soft within a month or two. A properly cured Crown Prince or Uchiki Kuri, stored somewhere cool, dry and frost free at around 10 to 15C, will hold for months, and Crown Prince in particular can still be good the following spring. Never store a fruit with a damaged skin or a broken stalk; eat that one first.