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.