Starship Asterisk*

geckzilla wrote:A wild pumpkin appears!

I love pumpkin vines. I will never forget the one year a pumpkin vine sprouted in my backyard in a spot where I had cleaned out a jack-o-lantern the previous year. It was a curious vine with giant leaves and we didn't know what it could be until... ta-da. PUMPKINS!

owlice wrote:I love pumpkins! And pumpkin "stuff," too: pumpkin bread and pumpkin cookies and pumpkin ice cream and pumpkin pie, and so on.

We don't carve our Halloween pumpkins; we draw on them instead, and then leave them out front to gently fall apart/be munched on/become one with the earth.

A few years ago, I found a couple of volunteer pumpkin vines growing in front of my house. One was in the bushes off to one side; the vine grew up, over, and into a yew, dotting it with creamy pale orange blossoms. These blossoms were a lovely contrast to the deep green of the yew.

The other vine was in the wasteland that is supposed to be a front garden, a patch of soil between the sidewalk and the house which is entirely under the soffit; protection from the rain makes the patch more suitable perhaps to prickly pear than to pumpkin. But no matter! This vine grew along the house, then wound its way around the corner and headed for the side door (but didn't quite reach it).

One morning as I left for work, I was astonished to see a pumpkin! I always looked at the vine when I walked along the front sidewalk, so I cannot account for never having see this pumpkin until that morning, but I hadn't: it was as though someone had simply placed a fully-formed pumpkin on the splash block. About a week later, I saw another pumpkin! It had not been there a week before -- I swear it just materialized!

Neighbors talked to me about the pumpkins; they were watching them grow, checking them out as they walked by, the one on the splash block being particularly noticeable from the street. One of these pumpkins became one of our Halloween pumpkins that year; the other rotted from beneath, so eventually enriched the soil rather than be harvested. Even into the next year, I would get comments and questions about the pumpkins.

I've had the occasional volunteer vines both before and since, but that was the only year I got pumpkins out of them.

Beyond wrote:Hey orin, maybe you'd better check your garden. You might find a $cash$ crop, like this guy did.http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/man ... 54517.html

Orca wrote:Orin, as the garden season winds down, what do you do with your remaining plant materials? Compost them? Or chew them back up into the soil right there in the garden? At first glance it seems that if I do the latter the soil in my garden box will retain some of its nutrients..

The wrap-up on my garden box experiment: both "standard" and cherry tomatoes are a go next year. As are zucchini and cucumber. The bell peppers won't make the cut. I got one red and one green bell pepper for the whole year and used up 1/3 of the box to do it. They were great peppers, no doubt; both tasty and attractive. However the return on those pepper plants was just too small. An extra tomato plant or two will provide much more benefit.

starstruck wrote: Last cut of the lawn for this season at the weekend; the mower now put away until next spring. It's the one weekly task in the garden that I don't miss doing over the winter months, mowing grass!

starstruck! wrote:Ann, it was the very last tomato . . one I'd missed when I harvested the last of them. It needs a haircut!
. . the others looked more like Orin's, fotunately

(not bad though, still eating home grown tomatoes in November!!)

starstruck wrote:

aster.jpg

Down to the very last bit of colour in the garden here in Yorkshire



these are my last flowers of 2011 . . .






and I thought, "How apt for Asterisk*", for they are . . .

. . . Aster !