It's the Not-So-Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

I think I've pulled the last of the survivors out of the garden and the rest will be compost-bound as soon as splodging around in 90+ degree heat and humidity sounds appealing to me. The icing on the flooding cake is the vile-looking wormy mosquito larvae that are wriggling around in every puddle of standing water in the yard. I love the risk of encephalitis and West Nile Virus in the morning. Mmmmm....good.

I have a few corn plants that are clinging to life and might produce corn the perfect size for some oompa-loopmas to eat. When I look at our growing cobs of corn I think about that scene in "Big," where Tom Hanks' character so delicately ate the baby corn and realize that's as good as it'll get for our corn. And I have one tiny okra plant that dared to flower - at only 18 inches tall, but the rest is history. Such is life.

One of the vegetables my boys were the most excited to grow in the garden was the pumpkin. They both like Halloween better than Christmas for some odd reason, and think all things Halloween-related are the coolest things ever. My oldest son has fantasies of growing an entire pumpkin patch and then maybe the Great Pumpkin will visit our garden and all will be well in his world.

So when the floods came and our once-vibrant pumpkin plants were reduced to leafless yellow goopy vines, the boys were noticeably disappointed. The good news is that sitting on the barren rain-soaked soil like little orange traffic beacons were the pumpkins that we had been diligently growing and fertilizing all those weeks before.

Aidan was excited to bring them inside and be photographed with them.


He asked if we could cut one open and carve it and put a candle in it and put it out front to scare the neighbors. I thought it was an interesting idea, but I'm just not that skilled with the x-acto knife.


Because the pumpkins were really, really tiny. Only a very poorly-executed Photoshop moment made them as big as Aidan was hoping for…


In fact, they've sat in the sun now for a week and have shrunk considerably more than when these photos were taken. Because, honestly, what do you do with a handful of plum-sized pumpkins in June?

A Pumpkin Birth Story

As you may have read, we have been trying unsuccessfully to grow a pumpkin since our garden was planted this summer. The pumpkin plants went from about 20 strong seedlings to one almost-dead plant and one just-clinging-to-life plant. This is about on par with my gardening luck. And as you may have read, I learned that pumpkins need to be pollinated by bees or other insects or they'll just wither and die. You can enter into the seedy world of hand pollinating pumpkins if you aren't prudish, but something's gotta get the boy flowers with the girl flowers or you won't have any pumpkins.

So I was excited when we saw our first male flower back in September. I know it was male because male flowers have a long stem. Everything I read said to begin expecting female flowers shortly after the males arrive. We waited and waited. Over a month went by. More male flowers. More male flowers… Farmer B and I decided that this plant might be of an alternative lifestyle, but we were going to love it and nurture it nonetheless.

Then Halloween weekend we're out in the backyard, when Mr. Keen-Eye Aidan screams "WE GREW A PUMPKIN! A PUMPKIN! LOOK! FOR HALLOWEEEEEEN!!" And dammit if he wasn't right. There on the end of the pumpkin vine was a little green pumpkin at the base of our first female flower. I know it's a female flower because they're closer to the stem and have a tiny green pumpkin at the base.
I jumped into the garden and searched madly for a male flower. Must pollinate now! Quickly! And I saw him - there was one pathetic droopy very sorry-for-himself shriveled up male flower clinging to life at the other end of the vine. Well this wasn't going to make any baby pumpkins. I had to try something so I snatched him off the vine and bunged him at the female flower who seemed to recoil her petals with disgust. I hear ya sister...

Maybe this is a bust. When we were at the local VFW pumpkin patch this weekend I spoke with the old guy manning the patch who said he had just gotten back from a class at the local extension office on what we can grow around here. He said that he asked them about growing pumpkins and they said "Don't try it. It'll never happen." So he decided to give up on his pumpkin quest and focus on sweet potatoes.

Maybe we ought to learn how to grow sweet potatoes too.

After the rain: Final Verdict

I've been carrying on about what TS Fay did to our already failing garden, but now it's time to belly up and show some pictures. It wasn't pretty before, but the saddest part for me is that we had beautiful green bean plants, pumpkins, sunflowers and peanuts starting. They were the only plants that were a nice shade of green and actually looked promising. Now even they don't look so hot.

I think I've figured out why we have so many beautiful dragonflies in the garden. Did you know they eat mosquitoes? Yup. They usually eat other flying insects, particularly midges and mosquitoes. The fact that I can't even go out in the garden to weed without being overrun by blood-sucking biting mosquitoes makes me welcome the dragonflies.Back to the plants. Fay's flooding killed off the rest of the tomatoes that were clinging to life. They are just brown sticks now. I do have one tomato plant in a cage that is still managing to grow, but it's not a pretty shade of green at all.
Oddly there are nice green tufts on the carrots, so I'm still wondering if they'll grow into anything. Is it allowed to annoy me that I accidentally planted the carrots out of season and they are the greenest thing in the garden right now? The peanuts look all right, although they aren't great - the sunflowers have yellowed and are drooping. I hold out hope that a few may pull through.

The pumpkins are the worst part for me. They were so green and leafy and promising. Now they look just plain sad. I'm clinging to hope that at least one will pull through. Here's the before and after pictures of my best pumpkin plant.

Before
AfterI did learn something new about pumpkins thanks to a highly credible source on gardening: the Halloween issue of Highlights magazine. They did an article on a little girl who grew a monster pumpkin that won a biggest pumpkin competition in California at 948 lbs. Apparently this little girl has more mad skills than I do. "Amber" says that the best way to get a pumpkin to grow better and bigger is to bury the vines as they grow. She carried buckets of dirt from other parts of the garden and scooped soil around each leaf joint. If the vine stays buried, a new root grows down from each leaf joint and sucks up extra water and nutrients for the pumpkin. She says that the big leaves are like waterspouts that channel water right to the root. I'd like to bring that little girl down here and watch her try to grow a one-pound pumpkin in our death dirt and then I'd send a hurricane or two her way and see how she rolls. Hmph.

Oh, I also read a very interesting pumpkin fact - a giant pumpkin can gain 25 lbs in one day. Fascinating. Not that I'll ever need this tidbit, but I liked it nonetheless.

So there you have it. The best pumpkin advice I've read so far. Highlights magazine. Go figure.