Pumpkins Are For Sharing

 The first year I grew pumpkins, I got lucky. I had cleared out this weedy garden bed in a sunny, sheltered corner. I am fairly certain the landlord hand been dumping law clippings into it for years, and then I added old leaves from the two big oat trees in the back. That entire garden bed looked glorious that Summer, and I grew 9 butternut pumpkins on just one plant. I learned how to cure them, and I proudly gave one to my parents and one to a friend. Pumpkins make a very good sharing vegetable. Almost everyone is familiar with them, and they keep for months so there's no obligation to find a use for them right away. 

I got an overinflated idea of what to expect from one pumpkin plant. The next year, and in a new house, with a new garden, I tried one pumpkin again and got three very small ones. Last year, I again planted just one plant and it yielded just one pumpkin. After that, I did some research and had a think about what I'd done wrong. For one thing, it's never a great idea to plant just one cucurbit. Cucurbits include your cucumbers, pumpkins, and courgettes. They all grow separate male and female flowers, and not always at the same time. You get just one type first, which allows the plant to grow bigger before putting its energy into making fruit. Eventually you start to get a mix of male and female flowers. Each flower only lasts a couple of days, so you just have to hope you get male and female flowers open on the same day and that the bees discover both. The more plants you grow, the better your odds. I have more than once resorted to hand pollenating cucurbits, but it's fiddly and I'd really rather not.

The second mistake concerns the weird growth habits of pumpkins. Any growing node along the vine that is touching damp soil can put down more roots. This neat trick helps to super-charge their growth as they start to ramble all over the place, or put out tentacles, as I like to call it. But that contact with damp soil is key. If you are growing them to climb a fence, or trail down a high raised bed, they are not getting that chance. And if, like me, you tend to mulch heavily with straw or similar materials in the Summer, you are also putting a barrier between the vine and the soil. If you are in a dry season, doing a lot of hand watering,  you need to water the ground all over in places where pumpkin vines are growing, not just around the area where the main roots are growing.

This Summer I constructed an entirely new garden bed in the front garden. It's about 2.5 square meters and I devoted most of that area to pumpkins. It's raised just 20cm off the ground, with lots of grass or garden path around it to ramble through. I planted peas along one side, a couple of sunflowers for company, and five butternut pumpkins around the rest of it. My goal was to grow enough pumpkins that I could give some away. I absolutely loved watching those monster tentacles ramble across garden paths and out into the driveway. I'm pretty pleased with them, but I still did not get anywhere near nine pumpkins per plant. In fact those five plants put together grew 7 pumpkins. So there is still plenty of room for improvement. I think I could have done better if I'd gotten even more compost mixed into the soil. Pumpkins are hungry little guys.

So, seven pumpkins, count them, see them lying there in the sun, getting fatter and more beautiful every day, slowly fading from light green to tan, getting ripe. It is not so many pumpkins, and they take a long time to ripen. I have gotten to know them all individually. When the Fall weather turned cold a couple of weeks ago, I picked one and put it right into the oven to roast for pumpkin soup. That was very satisfying. It was the first one to grow, so it was the most ripe. The others were looking only a few weeks off from picking when I had an unexpected development. I was coming back from a walk when I saw a familiar bit of vine lying on the concrete sidewalk. It was part of a pumpkin vine. I checked my plants and sure enough, someone had stolen one of my pumpkins.

It must have been a spur of the moment decision because they had ripped it out by hand, damaging the vine all around it. You would think I would be angry. Sure, it was a little startling. But my next thought was, I hope they enjoyed it. I walked all up and down the sidewalk, hoping I wouldn't find a smashed pumpkin to go along with the ripped out vine. I was relieved that I didn't. An act of vandalism would be pretty heartbreaking. But I don't think that's what happened. I'd like to imagine someone walking home late at night, someone who was a little short on food and worried about it. They looked over and there it was, just a meter from the path, a big beautiful butternut pumpkin. And they were tempted. Those things are five dollars each at the grocery store. There was a second one lying right next to it, but they just took the one. I hope it went to someone who really needed it. After all, my pumpkins are for sharing. I was going to give one to my nearest community pantry anyway.

The pumpkin in question.

The very spot where it was ripped from the vine (and the smaller one that was left unscathed)

This is the risk of conspicuous veggie gardening when you don't even have a gate. I accepted this risk; it was an experiment. Veggie gardening so close to the sidewalk can be fun. There was the elderly woman who stopped to tell me to adjust the position of the pumpkins occasionally so they don't rot. "I'm just being a nosy bitch" she joked, "but good job on the pumpkins!" And there was the time I was coming home and I saw a family out for a walk. It was a couple with a stroller and a little kid trailing behind. I was standing across the street and I could see they had stopped in front of my garden. I thought "oooh, are they admiring my veggies?" I was disappointed when I realised that the woman was just trying to convince the kid to keep walking. But then I heard the kid exclaim "But there's PUMPKINS, Mum!" 

Yes, it was entirely worth it. I've still got five pumpkins to cure. I'm looking forward to sharing them.