Nov 4: Growing Pumpkins

I've always wanted to grow pumpkins. I love their rich flavor and the way they blend so beautifully with brown sugar and fall spices, but I also think they're such a gorgeous vegetable. This year, for the first time, I planted pumpkins. Just a row of 3, with 3 seeds in each hole to make sure we'd get something.

And then I waited. And waited. I watered them, but the water seemed to form a film on that clay soil and then rolled right off into the weeds. So I mixed in some compost, gently, and watered them more. Weeks passed, and still nothing.

I had given up hope on growing pumpkins, when we had almost a week of rain in June. One day, I looked in our little pumpkin patch and saw 3 patches of tiny green shoots, sitting alone in that barren clay soil. I knew those were my pumpkins. By the end of the rain, 8 of my 9 seeds had germinated and most had grown a foot already.

Those vines grew and grew, until they started to edge up on our 6-foot fence and they spilled over their mesh garden fence and all through the grass. By late summer, there were green orbs hidden throughout the wildly-growing foliage. The green skin turned to beautiful, mottled orange-green, and I had my pumpkins.

Meanwhile, there were mysterious plants growing rapidly in our main garden. We didn't know what they were, but they looked like something edible, so we didn't pull them with the other weeds. The leaves were big and deep green and sort of heart-shaped, even though we hadn't watered them, and they grew like vines, with tendrils wrapping around fence and other garden plants. And they were prickly. We watched as papery yellow-white flowers formed, and we wondered what food we might get by fall. I noticed that the gourd I was growing in a pot shared all these traits - the tendrils, prickles, and almost heart-shaped leaves; the rapid growth - and we narrowed the possibilities to something in the squash family. Soon, tiny orbs started to appear on our mystery plant. The answer: about 3 different kinds of squash, sprouted from seeds left in our compost pile through the winter - spaghetti squash, medium-sized pumpkins, and several vines heavy with miniature orange pumpkins. What a gift from mother nature, and how ironic that our best crop this year was the one we didn't plant.

Here is much of our pumpkin harvest, both long-awaited and accidental. I was very proud.