Permaculture Pumpkin Patch Ideas

I grew my first decent amount of pumpkins last year, about 8 “hills” allowed to sprawl alongside my driveway and up a slope. Keeping them weed-free was a major issue and I know I spent too much time chopping and dropping than was practical.

The modern ag solution is, or course, spraying things that Girbot would flag me for even mentioning 😊
What’s the Permie middle ground? They take up way more room than I have covered by cardboard/mulch in the food forest ,so lawn is the only option (and I only have a little Mantis tiller, which I’m trying to avoid.)  

I’m thinking about laying out a big old tarp and planting the hills around the outside. I’ll aim the vines towards the middle and keep folding/rolling the tarp up as the vines progress inwards. I’m hoping that will suppress and solarize the weeds as we grow into the season and the center of the tarped area. And my weeding will hopefully be reduced to the edges.
Are there any other Permie pumpkin patch solutions?

My solution is to plant pumpkins in two locations: in the cold compost pile and in the brush piles. Free mulch! In the compost pile it's easy to pull out a few big weeds, and in the brush pile they climb up to the top and cover everything else rather than being out-shaded by tall plants.

You could select for varieties that shade out the grass better.  Or ones that climb and then locate them near things they can climb on.

My suggestion would be to get a load of wood chips for a 6' layer.

Next would be to train the pumpkins to grow on a trellis.

There's a method I'm testing this year, so I don't know yet how well it will work. Basically you carpet the area with seeds for something low-growing that either won't hamper the pumpkins, or better yet will help them. The short stuff helps crowd out weeds, but the pumpkin plant is tall enough to grow over them. You may need to cut or pull weeds at first, but the short crop makes it harder for the weeds to grow back every time, until the weeds just can't get through anymore.

At least, that's the theory. I tried this last year, but chose the wrong plants. In previous years when I planted chia, it never got more than a few inches tall, so I thought it would be great for this. Naturally that was when the chia decided to grow 5 feet tall.

I have a few different short crops, and plan to match them with whatever big crops I think they'll grow best with. Dwarf marigolds do well with anything except tomatoes. (Technically they do well with tomatoes, but the blossoms look a lot like fruit from a distance, and you'll end up driving yourself crazy looking for the actual tomatoes.) Dwarf basil in the tomato patch. Chia can grow in the sunflower patch, those are tall enough not to care. Beans and potatoes grow dense enough not to need a weed-control crop. Over in the perennials I'm planting oregano and creeping thyme under some berry bushes.

Again, this is still in the experimental stages. But, if you'd like to see if it works for you, I'd be curious to hear your results :)

Previous years I have just let the pumpkins go over the grass. A bit of a mess to clean up at the end of the season though. This year I have contained them by looping the vine back over itself within the garden. It has also decided to climb the neighbours mock orange hedge.  

I have recently learnt that what we here in Australia call a kent pumpkin is called a squash in USA.

In past years, I've planted pumpkins and winter squash in my raised bed garden. I don't think that's a good use of that area. This year I covered a fairly large area with cardboard and dumped about 50 - 50 gallon grow bags worth of soil over that area. That's going to be my main pumpkin/winter squash area. Honestly, I've been looking at companion plants that can partially shade the squash plants, our summer sun/heat is brutal. I'm thinking mainly ornamentals like cosmos, sunflowers and coreopsis. I will let you know how that goes.

Based on my positive experience last year, here's what I did.
1. Dug a circular trench
2. Spread dehydrated chicken manure and last years pumpkins
3. Chopped up the pumpkins (little ones got some extra flesh without seeds from the big ones for compost)
4. Raked the dirt back over

Yes, it's only March. But that's a good thing. Time for the flesh to break down and become compost. The seeds won't germinate until the soil is warm enough AND any that get frost killed don't matter. Pumpkins are smart enough to stagger their seed germination so more will come up later.

The circle will let me water, thin, and otherwise care for the pumpkins in one place while the plants grow out all around and occupy the lawn.

My raised beds keep getting swamped with pumpkins vines to the detriment of anything within a twenty foot radius of the plants. I've tried trellising with okay results but still struggling with stray vines.

I'm at the point where I'm going to plant the pumpkins on some underutilized land (hillside) and I am going to make holes in the ground and fill them with rich soil. They can sprawl all they want and the sun will draw them down the hillside. At least that is the theory.