I might be a bit over board with my fascination, wonder and awe at the robustness of my pumpkin patch. I as yet, do not have a lot of repeat visitors here. The Preacher’s wife is my most regular visitor and good-naturedly views the amazing (to me) patch. The truth is my family has shared the brunt of my pumpkin patch mania. I can get every member of my family to roll their eyes, if I so much as mention the word ‘pumpkin’. I have a hunch that if I whispered ‘pumpkin’ while they are sleeping, I believe that they’d groan and roll over in bed. How many pumpkins there are and when they’ll turn orange has seemed like perfectly good conversation starters (and finishers) to me.
The pumpkin patch has had a few tough days. When I bought the seed packet at the end of June, I did check to see that we had enough time to plant them, water them, grow them etc. in time for Halloween. I did the math and it was not a problem. Plant after the last frost, check. We were good to go! Nowhere on the packet did it say anything about the next frost. It is not like we didn’t have frosts in California, we did. I even have pictures of the year it happened and it wasn’t in September.
Luckily, our friend the farmer told me, that when it got cold enough for a frost, I should cover the pumpkin vines with sheets. This might keep them warm enough to not freeze. At first, I thought this might be a little like a snipe hunt. (Let’s see if we can get the pumpkin crazy city girl to put her pumpkins to bed at night with sheets) but it wasn’t. Our friend the farmer might tease about cats, but not about growing stuff. He knows what he is talking about and this was good old farmer type advice.
Given my repeated sharing of all things pumpkin, it was quite the testament of love the other night, in the dark and the cold as my Loving Spouse helped to cover the pumpkins as advised. 4 bed sheets, 5 beach towels, and 2 extra-large tarps only covered a small portion of the beloved patch. Trying to cover the patch at night by the light of the stars and not step on any of the coveted pumpkins was something of a challenge as well. Even the Teen helped to tuck the pumpkins in, covering pumpkins with a beach towel found in the depths of the debris from the back seat of her car.
Now we have a multi-colored patch, half the leaves are green and the other half black from frost, and finally a few pumpkins are turning orange. I’m wondering how many I have left, how many will turn orange, if they’ll still grow now that it is warm again and I’m trying very hard to not wonder out loud.
So now you may not have 100 pumpkins, but I hope you have a good number that survive, ripen and adorn your porch, mantle and table. Next year, you will have more experience with pumpkin growing!
Oh my gosh I had to let my meager patch go because it was too hard to keep it watered in this never ending heat …go figure!!! I sure hope they all ripen!