If you throw them in the yard when they start to rot they seedlings will not grow well. What you will have is a mass of 50 or so spindly seedlings that will mostly all die. I like having pumpkins around my house and consequently I rarely cut them up for seeds before they start to rot. It can be more smelly than usual to get seeds from a pumpkin that is starting to rot, so you can harvest them from the pumpkin whenever you are tired of it sitting around. However you should give the pumpkin about a month before you cut it up because I have read the pumpkin seeds continue to grow and mature up to 20 days after the pumpkin is harvested.

After you harvest the seeds you can plant them in the winter if you want but you should expect a lot of them to not grow, especially if we have a wet winter. You will have much better germination rates if you plant them in the spring after the last frost. I suggest that you save the seeds and plant in the spring.

Also, I know you don't want to hear this but don't be shocked if what you get from your seeds doesn't look like a cinderella pumpkin. If those pumpkins were grown with other pumpkins there is no telling what you could end up with. More than likely though it will be or resemble the cinderella pumpkin.

Thank you!!

1) How should I dry/store my seeds?

2) I don't really understand cross-pollination. I posted a ? but it looks like it's not showing! If I plant these seeds w/ seeds of other types of pumpkins, will the fruits not stay 'true?' If pollen from, say, a white pumpkin vine lands on a female flower of my cinderella pumpkin vine....what will happen?? Should I seperate types of vines next year??

Thank you so much!

If you search on here I am sure you can find lots of methods to store seeds. I personally don't do anything fancy I just separate the seeds from the fibrous material and place them between paper towels to dry overnight. Although it isn't always an easy task to separate the fibrous material from the seeds. I find that filling the sink with a few inches of water and dumping everything in makes it very easy to separate the two. Just use one hand to grab a cluster of fibers and the other to grab the group of seeds. After the seeds are separated and dry I just put them in a sandwich bag and label what they are and the year they are from.

If you do not want the plants to cross-pollinate you should look into hand pollination, it easy once you know what you are doing. I personally like to experiment, I like to see the neat crosses that can arise. You can separate the vines if you want but unless you have a lot of property the bees will just fly over to the other plants anyway. I don't know what would happen if you cross a white pumpkin with a cinderella pumpkin, but who knows maybe you could get a flat white pumpkin. Wouldn't that be wonderful. If you want to know what happens you can use hand pollination to intentionally cross pumpkins just be sure to write down the plants you crossed and maybe you can figure out how to make something really interesting.