Including growing pumpkins.
It has been a great, albeit somewhat short season of growing pumpkins. What started out as an experiment turned into a family project, but now things seem to be wrapping up in the pumpkin growing department.
It seems a little early to be done growing pumpkins, doesn’t it? I mean, Halloween is still quite a ways away!
Let me explain. You see, we had a very small variety of pumpkins, so they grew very quickly to start and then they matured quickly. Once a pumpkin turns orange it is pretty much done growing. Orange means ripe. We should have picked them once they turned orange…but we are amateur pumpkin growers so we learned our lesson the hard way. Some of them started to rot on the bottoms…I guess because of the wet soil they were sitting on. So, we quickly picked all of the ripe pumpkins because we learned that they store very nicely in a cool, dry place.
So, David picked all of them using one of my kitchen knives to saw them off the stems (I did not know about that little fact until after the deed was done…something I was not very happy to learn about). He is now storing the pumpkins in our basement. We actually only have 2 pumpkins that made it at this point. The other 3 succumbed to the aforementioned rotting.
All is not lost, though. We have another vine growing on the side of the house with a nice looking pumpkin on it that has yet to ripen. So, we’re keeping an eye on it and we’ll pick it once it turns orange.
One thing that has caused problems with our ability to grow pumpkins is an overabundance of powdery mildew on the leaves. At first we kind of ignored it, and by the time we sprayed it, I think it was too late. So, next time we will need to keep that under control. I’m hoping to do some research to find a way to control it without having to resort to crazy chemicals.
David is already planning next year’s growing season. We’re probably going to try to grow a slightly larger variety next time. David is also making plans for a full-blown vegetable garden. He has a long list of vegetables that he wants to try growing. I’m not really sure where this garden is going to be located, since we have a pretty small backyard, but we have the entire winter to plan out our garden.
Here are the latest pictures:
Our Last Pumpkin on the Vine
Powdery Mildew Kills Pumpkin Leaves!!
This is what the mildew looks like before it kills the leaves
After we’ve picked the last pumpkin we will take a picture of our harvest 
