Should You Put Straw Under Pumpkins? Notes From the Low Corner

There is a low corner of our patch that holds water three days longer than the rest of it. I found a good pumpkin sitting in it last week, a heavy one, the kind you start making plans for. I tipped it up and the underside had gone pale and slightly soft where it met the ground. Not ruined. Just headed that way.

So, should you put straw under pumpkins? Most of the time, yes. Once a fruit has set and started to size up, a handful of straw between the rind and wet soil is one of the cheapest bits of insurance in the garden. It is not a rule I follow religiously. On a dry year, in a well-drained bed, half our pumpkins never get any and they finish just fine. But in a low spot, or a wet stretch, or under a fruit that is going to sit there for another six weeks, the straw earns its keep.

What Straw Under Pumpkins Actually Does

The problem is not really moisture in the soil. It is moisture held against one spot on the rind for weeks at a time, with no air moving across it. A pumpkin resting directly on damp ground develops a flat, blanched patch where it makes contact. The rind there stays soft and thin instead of hardening with the rest of the fruit, and soft rind is where rot gets its start.

A few inches of loose straw lifts the fruit just enough for air to move underneath. That is the whole trick. The rind dries between rains, cures evenly with the rest of the pumpkin, and the flat spot stays firm and tan instead of going pale and punky. It also keeps soil splash off the fruit, which is how a lot of soilborne trouble arrives.

Boards work too. A scrap of untreated lumber, a broken shingle, an old roofing tile. Anything that breaks contact with wet ground does the job. I use straw because we have it, because it breathes better than a solid board, and because it eventually turns into something the soil wants.

When Straw Under Pumpkins Is Not Worth It

Here is the honest other half, and it is the reason I said most of the time rather than always.

Straw that mats down and stays soaked is worse than bare ground. If you pack a thick wet wad under a fruit and it never dries, you have built a poultice. Keep it loose and fluffy, a few inches at most, and pull it back and shake it out if it turns into a soggy mat after a long rain.

The other thing straw does is give slugs and pill bugs a dark, damp place to spend the day, right next to the thing you are trying to protect. In a wet year I find more of them under the straw than anywhere else in the patch. I still use it, because a chewed rind is a smaller problem than a rotted one, but I lift the straw every week or so and have a look.

Timing matters as well. There is no reason to tuck straw under a fruit the size of a plum. Wait until the pumpkin is sizing up in earnest and clearly going to finish. That is usually when it has stopped looking like a swollen flower and started looking like a pumpkin.

And this is a different job from mulching the patch. Mulch goes down early, across the whole bed, for moisture and weeds. Our guide to mulching your pumpkin patch covers that side of it, including why to keep mulch pulled back from the main stem. Putting straw under pumpkins is a late, small, fruit by fruit thing. You can do one and skip the other.

How I Actually Do It

I walk the rows every few days once fruit starts sizing. When I find one resting on soil, I lift the near side with one hand, slide a loose double handful of straw underneath with the other, and set it back down. Thirty seconds. I try not to move the fruit much or twist the stem, because a cracked stem is a far bigger loss than a soft spot.

Varieties matter a little here. The thick-rinded moschata types we grow shrug off ground contact better than a thin-walled carving pumpkin does, and the tan storage varieties are the most forgiving of all. Still, when one of the big ones is sitting in the low corner, it gets straw.

The other reason to keep the underside sound is what comes after. A pumpkin with a soft belly will not store, no matter how carefully you handle it, and storage is most of the point of growing the varieties we do. If you are planning to keep them into the winter, our guide to curing pumpkins and winter squash picks up right where the straw leaves off, and how long pumpkins last by variety is worth a look before you decide what to grow next year.

I went back to the low corner this morning. The pale spot on that pumpkin has firmed up and started to tan over, which is about the best outcome you can ask for once softening has begun. It will not be the prettiest one we bring in. It will still be a good one.

That is mostly what a season is. A lot of small, unhurried corrections, made early enough to matter. If you take one thing from all of this, let it be that putting straw under pumpkins costs you a handful of straw and half a minute, and that it pays you back in a fruit that keeps until the middle of winter.

If you are thinking about what to grow next year, the thick-rinded types are the ones that forgive a wet season. You will find them in our pumpkin and squash seed collection.

From the patch in Newton, Kansas.