The great pumpkin

I have no final photo from the 2010 pumpkin patch, but that's ok because it got all overgrown and you couldn't see everything anyway.  The final tally of successful pumpkins was 13.  We lost a couple on the vines, but I'd say 13 is a respectable number.  We already gave a few away to family and still have plenty to carve up.  Some of the vines clearly did better then others, but again since it was so overgrown it was tough to tell which pumpkins were attached to which vines. 

I should have taken better care to see what was where, but I'll see what I can remember.... Weed Destroyer ended up with 1 pumpkin. Gourdy had 1 pumpkin that died on the vine. Bird Fertilizer did the best with at least 5 pumpkins (all were great sizes). Seven had 2 pumpkins.  Trooper had 1.  I think Bob had 1 and Pumpkinerina Uno had 2.  While it's not scientific proof that bird droppings help fertilize a plant, it does paint a picture.  I'll throw some pics of the jack-o-lanterns up after we carve them.

The vines are withering and dying....Oh NO!!!!!

It would appear that the pumpkins are all healthy and doing well, but as of today Weed Destroyer has withered and died. He lost a baby pumpkin :(
We count about 9 healthy pumpkins, but I'm afraid the one orange one that's visible will just rot on the vine.... it still has another month or so before the season is upon us (plus it looks all warped).

I'm not sure why the vines/leaves are all turning brown and dying. I'm giving them plenty of water.  Scouring the internet indicates there could be a fungus among_us.  I think I missed my window of opportunity to destroy the destroyer of my pumpkin plants, but I'll try a fungicide and report back.

Hang in there little pumpkin plants!

The way back time machine

I know, I know... I've been slacking off on the whole blog thing.  Other things have occupied my time, so I'll post when I can.  The pumpkin patch is seriously overgrown right now, so I thought I'd go back a little in time to previous pictures and talk about some things I never got around to.
First off.....the race. Which pumpkin plant had the most ambition this year?

Races are much more interesting when the racers have cool names....like horse racing. I believe it was The Simpsons that had a horse called "About to be Glue".  Naming things is always tough. You want it to be interesting, but not random.  My kids name their stuffed animals by stating something obvious, like its color, and adding a "y" to it.  For example, one bear is named "Browny".  I took the liberty of naming the pumpkin plants (and allowed my kids to pick a few) so our race would be more interesting. While I can't really have a running commentary, you can at least join in the festivities in celebrating the winner.

Names for the race

The origin of the names isn't that impressive, but I'll share anyway: I named Gourdy in honor of my kids. ie. state the obvious and add a "y". Weed destroyer and Bob were the kids choices. Pumpkinerina Uno is the first plant to yield a pumpkin and while I would have preferred Pizzeria Uno, there are no pizza plants in my garden. Trooper is the plant that I wrecked at the beginning of the season and it survived. Bird Fertilizer should be obvious as the bird house is right over it. And finally we have Seven. The reference is to the Seinfeld episode. I would have preferred "Mug", but it was the 7th plant I put in the ground.

The 1st image above clearly shows that "Bird Fertilizer" is the winner of the race to the fence. Congratulations and best of luck to our future racers.  While the race to the fence may be over, we can still have contests as to which plants yield the most pumpkins or the largest, etc and so on.

We've already had one casualty. Pumpkinerina Uno has lost one pumpkin already. For whatever reason it rotted on the vine and became mush. Rest in pieces mushy pumpkin.

The pumpkins are coming, the pumpkins are coming!!

The pumpkin patch has grown at a tremendous rate. There's no point in weeding much anymore because the big beautiful leaves block them from getting a lot of sun.... plus the viney-grabby things (I know they're called tendrils, but viney-grabby things sounded cooler) are using the weeds to wrap around. I like to imagine the pumpkin plants are strangling the weeds so they can't steal the water and nutrients they need.

We're up to 6 pumpkins that I could find.  The leaves are so large and cover so much area that it was challenging to discover all of them. One, although slightly lopsided, is already turning orange.

Future jack-o-lantern

While the pumpkin isn't growing as fast as my two images would indicate, it's still cruising along. The first posts from this blog show the leaves growing at a snails pace and was quite frankly pretty boring to write about...thus the "not-so-gardening" posts about birds and such.  In any case, these pictures were not taken in 2 consecutive days, but the growth is still faster than the leaves.  I'd love to be able to turn this pumpkin right-side up when it gets bigger so it doesn't get that ugly mottled look from lying on the ground, but in the past when I've tried this I ended up damaging the vine. So I'll leave it as it lies. I have also read that leaving the vine loose around the pumpkin will leave less stress on the vine reducing the chance of it splitting. I have no problem ripping up the weeds that the vine has chosen as it's grabbing points.

Baby pumpkin

Our first pumpkin showed up a few days ago. It's growing fast, but we're still a ways away for the chariot races. It ticks me off that the weeds will grow in any conditions, but my precious plants wither and die at the slightest hiccup.  I have weeds that are growing in between my bricks in my walkway. It's been 95-102 the last few days with no rain. The bricks feel like volcanic lava when walking across them, but that's still not hot enough to deter the pesky miserable little weeds.  I have ripped them up, stomped on them and sprayed them with weed killer.  Yet they still come back to annoy me.  However, I water the pumpkin plants and try to keep them healthy and a small wind snaps the thing in half (I exaggerate of course, but it's more fun that way.)

Sheesh, I take a week off from the blog and the plants all popped. You can see the two closest ones are starting to stretch their legs.  I like Lilysails idea of guessing which one will hit the fence first. The ones that are closest have the biggest advantage, but they're also the ones that got beheaded by my vigorous weed plowing.  Not sure about giving away pumpkins to the people that guess correctly. If everyone guesses right then we'll have no jack-o-lanterns for the kids this year. And if nobody guesses correctly then I'll feel like the Scrooge of Halloween. I'll need to come up with a cool "Ebenezer Scrooge" name that's appropriate for Halloween.  I'm expecting some good suggestions from you folk. I'll get the ball rolling..... How about Gourdon Miserly? Or Pepo Deprivative?

Next tune in when we'll discuss Al's gourd-mobiles for the pumpkin chariot races!!

It's a race

Since the pumpkin garden is pretty uneventful, I thought we'd try a race.  Maybe the first plant to touch the fence wins?  The one pictured above is already the biggest, but it's the furthest from the fence...it should be a good race.  I imagine something like this:

Well maybe not, but I'll think of something...

"Who's going to save the wee turtles" (plants)?

This is the result of that pinched stem.  The wind destroyed my baby.... although looking at all the weeds and dry soil I'm guessing I need to pay better attention to the wee ones.  I broke off the wilted part and am keeping the one or two healthy leaves. I have faith that it will grow and hope that it will yield some pumpkins.  We still have 5 out of 7 healthy plants and hopefully no more strong winds.  Next year I will have to take extreme measures to avoid the damaging gusts:

This picture reminds me of a story that Father John tells us at church. I don't remember the entire story, so I'll abbreviate it: A dude (my term, not the padre's) built a garden for everyone to enjoy.  The children were using it as a playground and trampling the flowers and whatnot. Groundskeeper Willy (again, not the fathers words) saw the kids destroying the garden so he built a wall to keep them out and keep the garden healthy.  Well, he would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids.  They got ladders and climbed over the wall so they could keep playing.  So the groundskeeper built a taller wall that would certainly keep them out, but now nobody could enjoy the garden or even see it....the wall was so high it kept the plants from collecting their much needed sunlight so they started to die.  The man that built the garden for everyone saw this and had the wall destroyed stating that it was good that the kids were playing in the garden cause that's what it was built for.

Unfortunately this story does not help me with my wind issue and if I find the kids trampling my little baby pumpkins I'll build a wall around the kids instead of the gardens :) Just kidding!

bunny + coyote = natural solution

We found this bunny lying next to our butterfly bush last night.  I'm not sure if he's taunting us saying "haha I can hang out in your gardens and eat whatever I like and you can't do a thing about it....silly animal lover".  Or, is it being dramatic lying stretched out complaining about how hungry it is because of our impenetrable fence?  I found small mole holes near our veggie garden fence, but it appears that we have been successful at keeping the hungry bunnies out.  Unfortunately, they moved up the yard and this is the result:

Last year we had a family of coyotes living in the woods behind our house.  They were actually very cute and looked a lot better than the mongrels they are portrayed to be.  We didn't see any rabbits last year after they moved in..... natural predators would certainly cure my  flowers inability to bloom.

I read somewhere that strong winds can be a factor for damaging plants. (Since I can't remember the site I read that, check out this one...it's attractive and informative) I knew this already, but we don't get too many strong winds in CT, so I never really worried about it. Unfortunately, here you see just what the wind can do. I'm not sure if it's enough to kill off our pumpkin plant, but I'll keep an eye on it.  Only one of the plants is really taking off. They're all growing, but this one is the most visible:

You can see the results of the heavy rain-storms over the weekend....left dirt on some of the leaves.

Baby bluebirds

Seeing as how watching pumpkins grow is like watching water boil, I thought I'd talk about what's going on in the back yard. I caught momma bird feeding her babies. So I'm glad the open door didn't destroy the family. I was too slow with the camera to catch the mother feeding them, but you can kind of see the beak of one of the babies. While I was watching, I could see 3 babies inside vying for the hole waiting for their yummy morsels of bug lunch. Mom is waiting for me to vacate the area so she can silence their squawks of hunger:

They're growing very fast. The day the door was open, they looked all gross and feather-less, but peaking in now I can see they're starting to look like little birds instead of like a miniature Gollum: Precious....my precious!

Well, not quite, but you get my imagination.

I hope something interesting happens with the pumpkin patch...

The pumpkin patch sees less and less activity each day.  But as I mentioned in a previous post, I don't like to give up on my plants. So even though this pumpkin plant got it's head ripped off, I left the stem in the ground and low and behold....new growth! Yeah!!  I'm not sure it has enough time to get big and strong and produced pumpkins for this year, but I love the huge leaves on these plants so we'll see what happens.

This is the healthiest and fastest growing pumpkin plant in our patch. Reading up on pumpkins I found this site.  It didn't answer my question of "how big should my pumpkin plant be during the 2nd week of June in CT?" But lets face it...what website can answer that question?

slow day in the chris bantz pumpkin patch

Not much going on with the pumpkin patch.  The picture is of the biggest pumpkin plant so far. The soil looks very dry, but I just watered it last night. There's still tons of weeds...my rake trick is ok, but there's soooo many of them. I've even noticed weeds growing under my weed barrier in the vegetable garden.... how the heck does that happen? I thought the point of the weed barrier was to prevent weeds.  Solarization sounds effective and safe. I think I will try this technique out and see how it goes.

I don't know what to make of this.... Right after I post my story about the baby birds I went outside and found the front door to our bluebird house open.  I peered in and it looked like the poor little guys were dead. They weren't moving and momma bird was nowhere to be seen.  After I snapped a picture I used a stick to close the door and swing that clasp back into place. I've read that if momma bird smells some gross human on its offspring, it abandons them. I didn't want that to happen, so I was able to close it up with the stick.  When I hit the door with my stick, the babies all kind of jumped and shrunk down further into their nest. That gave me hope that they are still alive. Observing it for the past 2 days I noticed that momma bird was flying back and forth.  So she still seems interested in caring for her young. Yeah!! Catastrophe averted. But I wonder why the door keeps opening. This is the 3rd year I've discovered the door open. Previous years did not end well. I should put another clasp on the other side. But I'm wondering what cause the door to fly open....you have to apply some pretty decent force to open it with the clasp in place.  Could it be some vicious predator looking for a tasty snack? Perhaps our neighbors outdoor cat. That seems the most likely, but I've never caught him looking around the area.  I suppose it could also be the mother bird forcing her way out? Don't know.... maybe I'll setup a video camera. Then I could be like CTU from "24" and enhance the digital image to catch my perp.

GOT HIM!!!

cursed weeds

In an attempt to rid the pumpkin patch of the copious amount of weeds I tried hand picking some of the larger ones. Obviously this went nowhere fast.  So I grabbed a hard rake and attempted to move the soil around, but all that really did was destroy the weeds that the prongs actually hit. Again, this would take way too long for my taste.  I flipped the rake over and used it like a bulldozer. It destroyed every weed it came across, but I had to put a little elbow grease into it.  I became very excited at my success and increased my pace. Weeds were being obliterated by the hundreds and I was in mad frenzy, delighted that I found a cure for the gardeners bane.  That's when it happened.... In my haste I ran over my precious pumpkin plant ripping the leaves from the stem.  The poor thing didn't stand a chance.  If you look at the larger image, you will notice a small leaf that has just started to grow. It is in this single leaf that my hope for the future pumpkins rests.  I have never had the heart to just rip healthy plants out of the ground...especially if they flower or bear fruit/vegetables.

I have always had a respect for life and all living things. I am not opposed to hunting, I just don't do it myself.  I would try hunting with a bow given the opportunity, but I would have the thought that it was for food, not just for fun.  I remember in college I worked for a moving company.  They didn't have an actual moving job for me that day, so the boss sent me into the yard to clear the fence of weeds, bushes and the like.  No problem, but 3/4 of the way through the fence I became aware that a bird was screeching at me in her angry tones and did "fly-bys" of my head.  I started looking around a bit more carefully and noticed a nest in one of the more dense bushes I was clearing away.  Not wanting to destroy the babies inside, I contacted the humane society and they told me there was nothing they could do about it.  I turned to my boss and he suggested just leaving the nest alone and leave the bush growing into the fence.  Upon returning to the nest, I discovered that I had already inadvertently knocked one of the babies out and it lay dead on the ground.  I attempted to cut the branch with the nest on it and move it to a safe location so I could finish my job with the fence, but I was unsuccessful as I found the nest abandoned the next day.  I felt awful.  That feeling was only compounded when driving home a bird smashed into my windshield leaving a fuzzy white outline of where it had hit.  From that day forward I have done my best to avoid causing damage or hurting mother natures gifts.  While a pumpkin plant is hardly a family of birds, it still brings a negative feeling to hurt it. Regardless of how one looks at it, it's still a baby(seed) that I nurtured into a plant and was helping to grow.  The good news is that there's still 6 more out there.

Chris Bantz Pumpkins - Week 2

Nothing much doin in the Chris Bantz Pumpkin Patch today. You can see that big patch of green weeds cropping up in the middle. That's going to get ugly if I allow it to continue. I went around the edges of the patch with weed killer, but I didn't want to spray too close to the pumpkin plants for obvious reasons. I think tomorrow I'll hit them with some miracle grow. I've often wondered if those little biodegradable pots hinder growth at all.  In the small amount of research I've done, I did not learn anything that supports that theory. Next year, I will test that theory by planting some with the pots and others without

Doing some research on that topic led me to this site which shows an excellent method for creating your own biodegradable pots, so you don't have to buy them. Excellent!!

must be revenge

Well the little fiend is up to his old tricks again.  I can only imagine that he's upset that I tilled his home when I prepped the pumpkin patch.  The little mole upped another of my pumpkin plants and left his tunnels throughout the area..... too bad moles don't eat weeds, I'd have no problem with him ripping through the area if he did some good.  You can see the cracks in the dirt...it almost looks like he was trying to find the plant, just so he could lift it out and send me a message.  Hopefully he will hear through the "mole network" that I rescued one of his relatives from drowning in my in-laws pool and stop these shenanigans.

Day 6

There's not a whole lot going on in the pumpkin patch.  The weekend saw lots and lots of weeds popping up.  And while I pulled a few of them out, it will be overgrown with them if I don't keep on top of them.  Perhaps putting down the weed barrier would have been beneficial in this instance.  In any case, since the pumpkin plants aren't doing much, I thought I'd include a couple pictures from other parts of our yard.  The daphne is a beautiful little bush/tree....I missed the flowering with my camera, but it's still a cool looking plant.  I have no idea what the flower is called, but it's got great colors and it's very pretty. I want to thank Christine for that one: Thanks!!

Day 5

Well, as you can see there's hardly any activity in the garden.  The pumpkins are growing at a snails pace, so it's hard to tell there's even plants in the dirt patch.  I took the picture earlier in the day so the shadow of the shed doesn't hang over the focus of the picture. One of these days I'll get lucky and catch a bird coming in or out of that house on the right side of the image. Occasionally I will see mama bird poke her beak out to determine what's disturbing her beauty rest, but for the most part she stays well hidden.

The squash in the veggie garden have already bloomed a few of those big ole yellow flowers, but there does not seem to be much action with the pumpkins.

Day 4

Throughout the years I've noticed field mice tunneling through the melting snow and creating dead-grass tracks in the lawn.  Two years ago, I discovered nasty little critters with the designation: "mole" ripping up the yard and making their way into the garden.  Yesterday when I went to water the pumpkins I found a new tunnel tracking directly to one of the larger pumpkin plants.  Apparently my pumpkin plant was in his way because he proceeded to lift my plant out of the ground so he could continue along his path.  I guess the only thing that allowed this to happen was that I am using those biodegradable pots that allow the roots to grow through them.  Had it not been for that, he probably would have chewed right through the roots and killed the poor defenseless plant.  I caved in his tunnel and replaced my plant, but I doubt I have seen the last of this mischievous miscreant.  This event also allowed me to see that roots are indeed growing through the pot and makes me believe that the pumpkins, pale leaves or not, are growing fine.

Pumpking Garden Days 1-3

Since I have two gardens, I thought I would add a blog for the pumpkin garden and keep it separate from the vegetable garden. For the most part, we have had a lot of success with pumpkins. Last year was a dud and we yielded no pumpkins. The two years prior we had 13 and 6 pumpkins. This year, we have planted 7 pumpkin plants. I did not use weed barrier and I pulled out all the weeds I could find. Obviously I will need to stay on top of the area so the weeds don't take over the pumpkins. Since we don't plan on eating the pumpkins, I wonder if we can just spray the area with weed-killer or will that damage the pumpkin plants as well?

My only concern right now with the plants is that their leaves are all very pale. They receive a ton of sunlight and I've been watering them regularly.