The Minecraft ecosystem consists of several different types of plants and fruits that you can eat to replenish your hunger during your adventures.
It indeed makes sense to have such a diverse variety of edibles; after all, the game has existed for over a decade.
However, we’re not here to boast about Minecraft’s supremacy today. This blog post is exclusive to pumpkins in Minecraft – a block that, although it doesn’t offer any competitive advantage in the main story but is quite amazing because of its versatility.
Primarily being a decorative object in the game, a pumpkin can also be used as a food item as well as a crucial prerequisite to craft golems in Minecraft. Gathering them is easy, too – just pick up your hoe and farm them out on a fertile piece of land near your base.
While there are certainly other ways to gather a pumpkin in Minecraft, this guide will focus mainly on educating you about how to grow them in your survival world in addition to certain other things you should know about it.
So, without any further ado, let’s get into action:
What Items Do You Need to Grow Pumpkins in Minecraft?
To grow pumpkins in Minecraft, you have to first gather some essential items for the process. Growing pumpkins is fairly easy and doesn’t require any hard-to-gather resources. Here’s a list of the items that you need to gather:
Pumpkin Seeds
Pumpkin seeds are the primary item required to grow pumpkins in Minecraft. These can be planted on any farmland blocks that have an adjacent block available for the pumpkin to sprout. It takes around 10-30 ticks for a pumpkin to develop completely.
Moreover, even if you use bone meal, the pumpkin won’t appear immediately, but the stem will mature right away. Gathering pumpkin seeds is easy, too – all you have to do is locate a pumpkin stem in villages in the overworld and break it.
Breaking a pumpkin’s stem can drop 0-3 pumpkin seeds, and as the stem ages, the seed drop also increases. You may also be able to find pumpkin stems occurring naturally in the stem farm rooms located in the woodland mansions, taiga, and snowy taiga village farms as well.
Pumpkin seeds can also be found as a part of the loot in chests located at Dungeons, Mineshafts, Taiga House, and Woodland Mansions. If you have a pumpkin in your inventory, you can simply place it on the crafting table to yield four pumpkin seeds.
Lastly, they can also be acquired by trading with Wandering Traders in exchange for one emerald.
Hoe
A hoe will be used to till a piece of land where you want to grow a pumpkin. It can be made with a variety of materials, such as wood, iron, diamond, and even gold. However, it doesn’t make sense to use any of these items other than wood as a hoe for not much use except for farming.
To make a wooden hoe, you just need to collect some wooden logs and make some planks and sticks out of it. Making wooden planks is extremely easy – you just have to place the wooden logs on the crafting table and collect the planks from the output grid.
Likewise, to make sticks, simply place one wooden plank in the middle grids of the first and second columns of the crafting grid on the crafting table to yield four sticks in the output grid. You can also use bamboo in the same pattern to make one stick.
Once you have gathered both wooden planks and sticks, just place two wooden planks in the first row while keeping the last slot empty, and place one stock each in the middle box of the second and third rows. This will yield a hoe in the output column.
Water Bucket
While pumpkins in Minecraft do not require any kind of water source or hydrated land as a mandatory factor to grow, it can still help facilitate the process and allows you to prevent losing any additional pumpkin seeds. That’s why you need to have a water bucket to grow a pumpkin.
You first need to gather an empty bucket and locate a water source to fill it to get a water bucket. An empty bucket can be made by using three iron ingots and placing them in the crafting grid on the crafting table in the following pattern:
- One iron ingot each in the first and last grid of the first row
- Another iron ingot in the middle of the grid
Doing so will yield an empty bucket in the output grid. If you’re wondering how to get iron ingots in Minecraft, that’s easy too. You just have to smelt some iron ore, which can be found by mining, in a furnace using a fuel source such as coal (also found by mining).
Iron ingots can also occur naturally in chests located at temples, strongholds, and dungeons. On very rare occasions, husks or zombies may drop these iron ingots too, but you should settle for mining for better chances of finding them.
Bone Meal
While being an optional item for growing pumpkins in Minecraft, bone meal can be used to amplify the growth process of pumpkin seeds. Although it doesn’t have much effect on the growth of a pumpkin itself, it can certainly reduce the time required for the stem to grow.
Bone meal can be found in various places in the world of Minecraft. You can craft it from bones dropped by killing skeletons or found in treasure chests. Placing one bone on the crafting table provides you with three pieces of bone meal in the output grid.
Slaying a fish also has a small chance of dropping bone meal. Additionally, you can also make a composter in Minecraft by placing seven pieces of slabs on the crafting table. When you fill the composter with food or plant, it will compost it and produce bone meal.
After you pass a few days in Minecraft, you may also find a Wandering Trader close to your location. He will exchange a bone meal with you for a few emeralds. However, this trade isn’t considered quite worth it, so you be better off with other methods instead.
Step-By-Step Method Go Grow Pumpkins in Minecraft
Now that you have gathered all the necessary items required to grow pumpkins in Minecraft, it’s now time to get to farming. Here is the step-by-step process by which you can grow a pumpkin in Minecraft with ease:
Choosing The Desired Place
Foremost of all, you have to find a suitable place where you can sow your pumpkin seeds in order to grow a pumpkin. Pumpkins are quite unique in terms of their growth and don’t work like the other crops in the world of Minecraft.
It develops on an adjacent block next to the patch where the seed was sown. Moreover, it can only grow on specific blocks, namely dirt, coarse dirt, grass, farmland, podzol, and moss. It cannot be grown on any block other instead of the ones stated.
Tilling The Land
Once you have determined a suitable place to grow your pumpkin, you have to make the land favorable for sowing the seeds. To do this, you just have to till the land with the help of the hoe you just created earlier.
Simply grab the hoe in your hands and right-click on your mouse while pointing the crosshair at the block that you want to till. Tilling a piece of land converts it into farmland in which the seeds can be sown for the plant to grow.
Installing A Water Supply
After you have tilled the land successfully, you have to proceed with the setup process and add a water supply to your farmland to facilitate the growth of your pumpkin. This will also allow the farmland to stay hydrated and fasten the growth process.
To install a water source, simply dig a block in your farmland and add some water to the vacant space. If you have a moderately sized farm, even one block of water will be adequate enough to hydrate the entire land.
Sowing The Seeds
Now that you have completed the entire setup by making favorable land conditions and installing a water source, it’s time to sow the seeds you’ve been holding for so long. Simply hold the seeds in your hand and right-click on the mouse while the cursor is pointing to the farmland.
Sowing the seeds won’t immediately grow a pumpkin, and you’ll have to wait for a while to let the plant grow into a pumpkin. Also, make sure you sow the seeds only on the types of terrains we discussed above to make sure that the pumpkin grows.
Using Bone Meal
As you’ve now sown the pumpkin seeds, you must be waiting for the stems to appear and gradually get a pumpkin after some time. You can speed up the growth process by using a little bit of bone meal on the farmland.
Although bone meal won’t grow a pumpkin itself, it will begin revealing stems on the plant that indicates that a pumpkin will sprout out from it soon. Don’t overuse it on a single plant multiple times, as it won’t have any effect on its growth.
Harvesting The Pumpkins
Everything’s done, and you’ve already made yourself a farm with some juicy pumpkins grown on it. Now go ahead and farm them for various different purposes that we’ll be discussing later in this blog post. To farm them, just shatter them into pieces.
Now you can either choose to make some more seeds with it and grow your farm or use the pumpkin to make a Jack O Lantern and more.
Tips To Grow Pumpkins Faster in Minecraft
Pumpkins have a slight benefit in terms of farming speed when they are sown on well-hydrated farmland. It can easily soak water from four blocks away in any direction and stay hydrated as long as a water source is available.
Also, it is stated that pumpkin stems tend to sprout a pumpkin faster when there are no multiple stems directly next to each other. This is due to the random tick speed variations in the game and makes these crops grow. This way, you can gain a greater number of pumpkins in less time.
Ways To Use a Pumpkin in Minecraft
There’s a reason why we said that pumpkin is a very versatile fruit at the beginning of the blog post. It has certain varying uses that, although they do not make any sense, sure do add a fun element to the game. Let’s take a look at the various uses of Pumpkins in Minecraft:
- Pumpkin Pie – a food item that restores hunger points for your player that can be made by placing eggs and sugar along with the pumpkin on the crafting table.
- Jack O’ Lanterns – You can carve a pumpkin and add a light stick to it and make a Jack O Lantern for decoration purposes
- Golems – Pumpkins are an essential item to make both iron and snow golems in Minecraft
Final Words
As we’ve outlined in this article, growing pumpkins in Minecraft isn’t as complex as it might seem.
In fact, as long as you follow the simple steps, you’ll be able to grow your own pumpkin from seed but may take some time, but when that bright orange fruit finally grows out of the stem, it will be well worth the wait. Good luck!
