I've discovered a few things today whilst attempting to reclaim my garden after a month of neglect. Honestly, it was hard to get anything done this summer in the yard, and when I would look back at the garden, I would be overcome with discouragement. I just couldn't bring myself to fix the mess and therefore it made a bigger mess. But I promised myself that I'd do a half hour of work a day out there this week, starting yesterday, to see how things improved. So yesterday I mowed and cleaned out the pool and filled it.
Today I harvested the garlic I could find before it got too dark to hunt. And one of the things I discovered is that garlic harvested after the stems dry doesn't hold together. I have a basket full of garlic cloves. No bulbs. So I'm going to dehydrate a bunch of them so they don't go to waste (a lot of last year's harvest went to waste over the winter. I don't know why they didn't keep this past year).
The other thing I worked on was the weird zucchini plant that has taken over the yard. I hacked back a bunch of it, just so I could get back to the compost. And I realized the plant went over my fence and into the parking pad where the tree is all cut up and drying into firewood. I went around through the gate to see about gathering up more of the vine when I saw it.
The huge pumpkin sitting in the mulch next to the firewood.
It's not a zucchini vine. It's a pumpkin vine. That makes the "zucchini" I thought I'd picked off the dang thing make more sense. It seemed so alarmingly large (in such a short time). Now I know why. Because it was halfway to this gigantic orange pumpkin. Like a foot and a half tall and 8 inches in diameter (at least). I don't have any experience with growing jack-o-lantern pumpkins. Pie pumpkins do not look like this. Of course, foolish me for thinking the vine was zucchini in the first place. But still. So The orange pumpkin snapped off the vine easily and I took it inside to my stunned family. And left the rest of the vine be until I was sure it wasn't going to produce any more.
Huh. Any ideas about what to do with a green pumpkin the size of a throw pillow?
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2 comments:
I don't know, but I'd love to see a picture of it. I saw an alarmingly huge squash-like thing in someone's garden last weekend. It really deserves to be entered in some sort of contest.
Our volunteer pumpkin vine has not produced anything but flowers.
The local farmer's market is selling pumpkin or squash flowers for $1 a blossom -- maybe I should set up a pumpkin blossom stand in front of the house. Might make enough for our Halloween pumpkins.
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