Growing pumpkin – Beautiful Chaos

Another little flashback to last growing season, but this beautiful bee picture, I just had to share.

The next picture is not very sharp, but you can see that the bee is packed with pollen.

Flying bee packed with pollen — **Bee packed with pollen**

And where is this bee going? Well, the bee is visiting my flowering pumpkin; I rose from seed I saved the previous year from our own pumpkins. This growing season (2023) I had planted my seedling pumpkins in a new compost bed, which was not ready yet. As I had written before all but one pumpkin plants died. We love pumpkin soup and pumpkin pie, so one plant will not do for our needs. So first things first, we raised some new pumpkin seedlings from seed I had saved from our own pumpkins the year before. The only thing missing was an adequate planting spot, but my husband was able to fix that for me.

He scratched together what we had left of the horse manure we had purchased in the fall 2022. It was dry with very hard chunks, but after my husband mixed it with some saw dust and ran it through the manure spreader it was much more usable already. He dumped a big pile on some cardboard in our garden 4 just beside the failing composting bed.

Big pile of Big pile of horse manure mixed with saw dust lying on cardboard in a garden lying on cardboard in a garden — **Horse manure mixed with saw dust**

This was 25^th of June, which is very late in the season to start with small pumpkin seedlings, but we planted them anyway. For the start we watered the seedlings a few times.

Beginning of August the seedlings had settled in nicely and started to bloom.

Small pumpkin plant with a yellow flower on the top of a horse manure pile — **Blooming pumpkin plant**

At this point I sowed some red beets and some peas in the sides of the pile.

Middle of September we had a whole rug of pumpkin plants.

A rug of pumpkin plants covering a whole garden patch — **A rug of pumpkin plants**

We where able to harvest, when I remember correctly, 6 ripe pumpkins of these plants and had a number of unripe pumpkins still on the plants.

An unripe yellow pumpkin still on the plant lying in the grass — **An unripe pumpkin**

You could argue if the amount of work was worth the effort for “only” 6 pumpkins, but I am glad we did it. Now I know for the future that if the first planting fails there is time for a second planting to crop and we would not have to go without delicious pumpkins.

As for the peas and red beets, they looked beautiful by middle of September, but sowing beginning of August is definitely too late for them to crop. Only the peas and red beets at the bottom of the pile germinated, so higher up at the sides probably was not enough moisture.