Wild Hope Homestead

I am feeling a lot of warm fuzzies towards pumpkins right now. I finally finished using last season’s pumpkins, at which point I must say Crown pumpkins have most excellent storage abilities, by making a chunk of baby food and giving one away to the pumpkin-obsessed Little Sister. Also, there is this thing called The Great Pumpkin Carnival that we went to on the weekend. I had to be there. It sounded fascinating. There were categories to enter, like heaviest pumpkin, best carved pumpkin and pumpkin scones. Unfortunately, I didn’t have pumpkins worthy of entering any of the categories. Although, had I read the list better, I could have entered something in the Oddest Shaped Vegetable class. I can usually find an odd-shaped vegetable lurking around in my garden without too much trouble. There was a downhill pumpkin rolling race, but we missed it because The Little Fulla was getting tired. What really fascinated me was the giant pumpkins. I mean GIANT PUMPKINS.

There is something very exciting about giant pumpkins. Well, to me anyway. Who knew they could get so big? There was a class for Heaviest Pumpkin Under 200kg and they were huge as it was, but then there were a few in the Heaviest Pumpkin Over 200kg class. Do you know how heavy the winning giant pumpkin was? 789.5kg. Yup. Obviously, I want to grow a giant pumpkin now. I must. I have no delusions of it being of that kind of size but I have to start somewhere. I also want to grow Most Perfect Pumpkin, Oddest Shape, Oddest Shaped Vegetable and maybe get some baking done for next year’s carnival. Right, I am going to need more vege beds.

Anyway, what I was really going to talk about, before I got swept away in awe by the GIANT PUMPKINS, is this season’s pumpkins from my garden. They are not giant, but I am rather pleased with the pumpkins that have spurted forth from my garden, considering the lack of time and effort I put into them. I have harvested seven from my two pumpkin plants and there is one more pumpkin yet to harvest. This is only the second time I have grown pumpkins. They are so easy. I barely did anything to them, other than an occasional water and an occasional hacking or rounding up of creeping stems to keep them under control. However, if I want to get bigger pumpkins I am going to have to up my game. They must be fed. And GIANT PUMPKINS, well, that’s an entirely new game. But I wanna play! Bring on the GIANT PUMPKINS! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to peruse the pumpkin seed listings…