My Wilted Thumb, or, My Poor Pumpkin

So back in May, as I goo-ed and gah-ed over my giant baby pumpkin, I promised updates all summer on her progress. There haven’t been any. I’d like to put forth the argument that I didn’t really break my promise, because – pitifully, there never really was much progress. First, here is the pumpkin plant as of last Saturday:

It doesn’t look so bad, save for one notable exception: do YOU see a giant pumpkin? I sure don’t. I don’t even see a little pumpkin. Problem is, none of my pumpkins seemed motivated to grow this year. Not even the regular-sized ones.

By the last week of August, I finally had a baby pumpkin on this plant. I figured that maybe if the fall was nice, I’d have a month to let it grow, and even a month ought to be good for a giant pumpkin to get sort of big, right?

I forgot one little detail. I have a beautiful 6-foot fence around my entire back yard. This pumpkin is not in my back yard. Here is the status of my pumpkin at present:

Poor pumpkin. It is a cruel fate, to be gobbled by deer then tossed aside like so much flavorless squash…

It was about the size of my fist when this happened.  Here’s my next-best pumpkin:

We’ll see how big it is when the deer get to it. I guess I’ll have to take a pass on this year’s Pumpkin Festival (unless I want to try clocking in with the world’s smallest pumpkin).

In other cool pumpkin updates, look what’s hanging out in my pumpkin flowers!

There’s no perspective in this photo, but each of these bees is about the size of my thumb. There were two bees in every flower that I peeked into. So strange! With that much polination action, you’d think I’d have more pumpkins. Maybe the beese waited until September to get busy this year.

Read Full Post »

Giant Baby Pumpkin Comes Home

It’s here, it’s here! My giant pumpkin has arrived!

Isn’t it cute and inconspicuous? Well… that is a gallon ice cream bucket it’s in. I suppose “inconspicuous” is relative.

After a whole week of back-and-forth with Giant Pumkin Guru Matt, I finally managed to arrange a seedling hand-off this evening. The reply to the question “what does one do with a 300+ pound pumpkin?” : feed it to the deer, or possibly to bears. Of course. The whole week of back-and-forth was largely due to trying to answer this question. Turns out giant pumpkin growers simply assume you mean “how do I get this thing out of my garden?” (The answer involves a fork lift, by the way.) What happens after that is not nearly as important. Unless you’re my husband. But satisfied that we could feed it to the local bears, he agreed I could try this craziness.

Turns out these things are pedigreed. Check it out:

That’s the seed packet. These seeds come from a 798-pound pumpkin grown by someone named Biga in 2006. THAT pumpkin’s parents were 500-pound and 820-pound pumpkins grown in 2004 and 2005? I’m a little baffled about that, actually. And how do pumpkins come in male an female? Hm. Apparently I have more to learn about pumpkin breeding.

Mostly, I just want a really giant pumpkin to make my neighbors jealous.

I’m going to plant it tomorrow. I expect there will be updates all summer about this thing’s progress. I’m like the annoying cat lady, but with a pumpkin. Speaking of which, “this thing” clearly is not an acceptable reference for my giant pumpkin. It will need a name. Any suggestions?

Read Full Post »

Lest I be fired…

I’d better get a post up before the end of May. Two whole months missing from the archive is just too much to excuse. What can I possibly say that is witty? I blame my recent silence on the dead batteries in my camera. Dustin’s got a great camera, but if I take pictures with it, I have to find a way to get pictures OFF it, and that’s a little more tricky. If pictures were just a little easier to get to, I could tell you all about my recent adventures in Music Man, kite-flying, onion-shrinking, and giant pumpkin envy.

Hmm. I can find a picture of a giant pumpkin somewhere online. Let’s do that.

Photo filched from blackhillsgiantpumpkins.com

I wanna grow a giant pumpkin. There was an article in the Rapid City Journal last week about growing “extreme pumpkins,” and now I have pumpkin envy. Who doesn’t need a 700-pound gourd in their backyard?? Though seriously, if I was going to grow a pumpkin that big, I’d have to do it somewhere where the neighbors could see it too. Y’know… so they’d think I was overcompensating for something. (What do women overcompensate for? Hmm…)

But there’s a problem. I searched the Giant Pumpkin Website and found no answer to it there, so I sent an email to the Giant Pumpkin Gurus, Lisa and Matt:

I saw your article in the RC Journal last week, and I’ve been daydreaming about growing giant pumpkins ever since. I have the space and the interest – there’s just one problem. My husband says I’m not allowed to grow anything that weighs more than I do unless I have a plan for what to do with it at the end of the year. I know you have a pumpkin fest where I can come show it off (assuming I can even find a way to GET it to the pumpkin show… I don’t think my Toyota Camry will quite cut it), but then what? What becomes of all these prize-winning pumpkins? Do they get baked into 6000 pies? Sold as playhouses? Mulched for canabalistic fertilizer of next year’s crop?

I’d love to hear back from you. Thanks!

I am waiting anxiously to hear what they might have to say.

In the meanwhile, I’m going to have to assume I may not be allowed to grow my pumpkin after all (or that it may simply be too late in the year to start) and will have to content myself with trying to grow spaghetti squash – the newest addition to this year’s garden.

Updates to follow.

Read Full Post »

The Murder of My Pumpkins

I’ve decided. In South Dakota, we don’t have seasons. We have Never-Ending Winter which is occasionally interrupted by Hot. No Spring, no Summer, no Fall. Just Winter and Hot.

I’m bitter, you see. Yesterday, I had a beautiful leafy garden with great potential. There were dozens of green tomatoes on the vines. There were five or six plumping melons. Bushels of lovely gourds in every shape, size, and color. And hope of hopes, there were pumpkins. We planted two types: a small type that’s supposed to be good for baking, and a big beautiful kind that is supposed to make fall a more festive season.

We didn’t get any pumpkins at all until August, when one pitiful little pumpkin finally appeared on one of the little pumpkin plants. It wasn’t much, but it was healthy and pleasantly symmetrical. The other pumpkin plants flourished and vined and took over the lawn. Millions of big orange flowers but not even a hint of fruit until last week. Seriously! First week of September we got our first real pumpkin. It was about the size of a chicken egg when the frost killed it this morning, along with everything else (except the carrots, which I don’t even like anyway).

I’m so mad! I feel like there should be an 800 number I can call to complain. “There is nothing in my garden contract about frost in the first week of September! And by the way, what’s up with my dead peas??”

But there isn’t. And I should have known better. It was 45 degrees and raining all day yesterday. I thought about putting a blanket out last night, but none of the forecasts said frost.

(That should have been my first clue. Since when are the forecasts around here EVER right around here?)

What a crappy summer. It was cold and rainy all the way through June, and then suddenly it was record-breaking hot during all of June, July, and August. We paid a million dollars in air conditioning bills and my grass never did get to looking much better than crispy. And now welcome to September – time to freeze again!

I was thinking about this in the car this morning. Here in South Dakota, we spend nine months out of the year in grey, dreary coldness. Naked trees, yellow grass, icy roads. You’d think all these pine trees would give some relief, but if they aren’t covered with snow, they just look black. Summer comes and goes and we hardly have time to get used to it before it’s snowing again. I heard someone say once that the four seasons in South Dakota are Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter, and Construction. I’m beginning to think they’re right.

Don’t get me wrong. I love snow. The more the merrier (especially if there’s so much I can’t leave the house). All I’m asking for is a little transitional cushion on either side! In the spring, there’s always a late frost that comes in and kills all the budding trees and sets the whole season back a month. Enough of that! Let spring start in April like it deserves! Every fall, there’s snow before the end of September. Okay fine, but can’t we ease into it with some mellow days where the trees are beautiful colors and the wind just a little crisp before the arctic drops down and kills all my vegetables?

I deserve pumpkins.

Read Full Post »