The ideal plant for your patches is the Buffalo Gourd Cucurbita foetidissima, but it´s fruits have too much cucurbitacine, so they aren´t properly used for human consumption.

With a really huge rhizome this desert gourd can grow 5 feet deep in poor soils like your´s and develop vines 40 or even 50 feet long.

For me it would be of interest, if you could grow a Cucurbita maxima variety in the shade of the Buffalo Gourd and cross them open or with some forced pollination but mostly done by bees.

We need a variety with short leaf stalks, so it will not grow higher then the Buffalo Gourd. And my best new variety for that purpose is the flat Olive, as you see here.

and here the flesh, which is not really orange... more a deep yellow:

I would love to send you seed for free from Europe, but C. foetidissima you have to buy in the USA...or you find a fruit of this weed at the side of the road in Southern California.

Yes, you might grow C. foetidissima very early in the season to shade my C. maxima 'Flat Olive' when seeded in April.

Fruits of the Flat Olive cross with Baffalo Gourd will be bitter for sure, but F1 seed is valuable for you and me to grow it with the Flat Olive again and again until it is edible.

Interesting suggestion, but I really want to know how to grow Pumpkins so I'll have some in October for Halloween. We have some wild nasty cucumbers that grow here, and are invasive. We are always pulling those out! Thanks for your nice offer, but I need to know how deep the roots of the pumpkin go, so I put enough compost in the hole to support the growth.

Roots go deep, when there is air and carbon. When you work with a broad ford, like we giant pumpkin growers use it, you normally bring in compost one foot deep. But when you incorporate organic matter with your rotor tiller, the working depth of that machine limits.

If only want to give a few pounds of ammendments into a planting hole, I think that would be not the best way. For your crude soil from granite you would need compost under the vines too.

C. pepo 'Halloween' style pumpkins won´t grow so easily in you anza-borrego climate. Better grow Cucurbita argyrosperma 'Cushaw' calabaza with nice and/or edible varieties.

Thank you! Compost under the vines is not a problem. We have a big compost bin, and a bunch of dairy farms below for easy access to manure. Actually there are many pumpkin growers in the valley. They get all the good minerals we have up here during storms I guess.

We have a few Moringa Oliefera trees that make amazing mulch and compost with their rich leaves. I'm not sure where Anza Borrego is, but we are in a micro climate in Riverside County overlooking Hemet Valley. Avocados, Citrus, Olives, Figs, mangos, Macadamias all thrive here. It's quite odd. The temperature changes as you climb the hill from the valley below 2-3 degrees. Cooler in Summer, Warmer in Winter.

So I'll give this a try and create a bowl at least a foot deep for the compost. The actual seed will be inside a gopher basket that already contains a mulched and composted tree, but hopefully the pumpkins roots will find the fresh compost next to their planting spot. Too many gophers up here. Need to protect the roots.

Good mass minerals like potassium are mineralized out of granite...only nitrogen comes through storms, but you would muck far too much with the fresh nitrogen out of cow dung!

Now as I see, that you want to grow in the far south of California, I think about your record high temps of 115°C and ask you: could it be, that your pumpkin growers prefer cushaw and not halloweens?

Gophers ignore your mechanical protection sometimes, so I would rather feed them with their favorite dish near your cucurbits. I do so with voles now.

By the way: I would very much like to see your wild gourds and maybe have seed of them.

acorneti, I wouldn't wish those wild cucumbers on my worst enemy! They are evil! Very invasive. You do NOT want those! The local slang is wild cucumber, but they are spiny awful things, and I wouldn't call them gourds.

Our highest temperatures are about 103 degrees F. That's in August. The average is 97 degrees F. I don't know what the pumpkin growers grow, but they look like jack O lantern pumpkins! Huge trucks full, are on the roads in October heading to sell them I guess.

What do you feed your gophers? I feed mine ricin in the form of the beans of the Castor Plant. I grow a huge Castor plant unprotected at the bottom of our property, and the gophers don't touch it. Not sure if they eat those beans, but we also put gopher poison in their holes. I heard a rag soaked in ammonia will send them to the neighbor's property. They don't like that smell in their tunnels. Trying everything! Also heard slugs will attack my little sprouting pumpkin seeds. Sigh.

Ammonium brings powdery mildew to Halloween style pumpkins!

I always say: NEVER FREE NITROGEN TO CUCURBITS!

But I know, that your wild cucumber is Chilicothe or Marah macrocarpus.

And I suffer skin-sore, which could be treated by a paste of Chlicothe seed!

As a breeder of all groups of cucurbits I am able to tame Chilicothe in our cooler climate!

I beg you DesertDance, send me Chilicothe seed.

I have studied agriculture in the early 1980s and the industrialized production of herbs in the late 1980s, but I can´t buy your Chilicothe seed here in Europe.

Telling me that something just won't grow here is like waving a red flag at a bull! lol! I always push the limits. Pumpkins are heavy feeders so lots of manure is needed. If the soil/manure/compost is too shallow you can manually feed the plants through the growing season. They also need a lot of water and sun. I would try it but not with Halloween pumpkins. Eating those is not recommended. They have little flavor and are usually for display only, unless you want to sell them at Halloween. Maybe also grow eating pumpkins or squash?

Try it, regardless of what anyone else says.

Pumpkin plants are very tender and won't endure any frost at all.