Hi there!

This is my first year growing pumpkins and I currently have one actual pumpkin growing, and 4 other separate pumpkin plants growing, their vines are still pretty small.

The one pumpkin I currently have growing has been growing for about the last 4 and 1/2 months.

Once I started seeing female flowers sprout up I waited a few days to see if the bees would do their jobs but they did not so I wound up hand pollinating, which resulted in my pumpkin.

The issue I'm currently having is not only are quite a few of the leaves starting to get white spots on them, but there are also 4-5 splits appearing on random parts of the main vine.

When my pumpkin was still tiny a split formed on the main vine very close to where my pumpkin was growing, but I buried the part of the vine that had a split in it and it's seemed to recover.

I do not have my vine's roots in the ground because I live in an apartment complex and the soil we have here is red clay based, which obviously isn't the right kind of soil to grow anything in.

I have my vine growing in a large potter and up until the splits started appearing my pumpkin vine was doing great.

I use Miracle-Gro Watering Can Singles All Purpose Water Soluble Plant Food once every 6-7 days and also use Ortho pesticide every 7 days to keep the bugs away because I noticed early on something had been chewing on my vines leaves.

I also water my pumpkin twice a day, once in the morning before work and then later at night because I know it gets really hot.

I wanted to know if maybe the Miracle Grow plant food was doing more harm to my pumpkin vine than good since it has extra nitrogen in it, or if maybe the white spots I'm seeing is fungus.

Here are a few pictures I took today after watering.

http://tinypic.com/r/30jicyf/6

http://tinypic.com/r/23haia0/6

http://tinypic.com/r/2mfkd9x/6

http://tinypic.com/r/ngcyu8/6

http://tinypic.com/r/2qbhguq/6

http://tinypic.com/r/9109s5/6

http://tinypic.com/r/w0sze1/6