I planted pumpkins, and they started wilting almost immediately. Everything I did seemed to do nothing, so I decided to just give up and ignore them. What few plants that were left went on to produce. I guess they thrive on being left to do their own thing... A few years ago we had some volunteer pumpkins that we "helped" by randomly watering once a month and evicting the goats. We got two monster pumpkins from those plants. I think next year I'm going to plant pumpkins in random places and totally ignore them and see if we get overrun.