We can bee friendlier to the nature

Third consecutive year, at the Biotechnical School Maribor, we decided to include pumpkins in the crop rotation. The main reason is, of course, pumpkin oil obtained from pumpkin seeds. On Tuesday, September 11th, 2018, students of agricultural technician started with a typical autumn farm chores, harvesting a pumpkins. Due to less precipitation in the summer time, the crop was lower than it should have been, but it is still higher than in 2017.
The pupils separated all the pumpkins and placed them in the rows, where they waited for a pumpkin combine.
The next day, we started the counting, measuring and weighing of randomly selected pumpkins. The measurements were taken very seriously, since the results obtained were also needed for the ERASMUS + project.




With the measurements, we wanted to find out what the crop is on the whole surface, what is the average weight of pumpkin, average diameter, quantity of pumpkin seeds, etc ..
Work was done quickly. So those who counted pumpkins in the field as well as those who carried out the measurements.



We were interested in the proportion of pumpkin seeds in pumpkins. That's why we decided to remove pumpkin seeds by hand. We first weighed pumpkins,



split them in half and remove the seeds.



In the end we weighed the seeds, to determine the proportion of seeds in the pumpkin.



This year's measurements can be compared with last year's. It will be interesting to see, how weather affected on the pumpkin and pumpkin seeds production.
The other pumpkins were mechanically harvested. The combine picked up pumpkins with a hedgehog, crushed it, separated the pumpkin meat from the seeds, and finally stored seeds separately.
After the harvest, pumpkin seeds were dried.

pumpkin harvest 2018 (pdf, 27 KB)