Squash Harvest Day

Left to right: Cinderella pumpkin, regular pumpkin, overgrown summer squash and a WTH. It's oblong and large and pumpkin-ish, but not what I planted?

Bad Things Happening in my Garden

 Yikes! I usually share pictures of beautiful things in my garden, but here are two ugly things that have shown up recently. Above is a leaf spot problem on a cucumber plant. I suspect it's anthracnose. Below, powdery mildew on pumpkin leaves. Treatments are available for both. I won't treat the cucumber plant, though. I will pull it up and discard it. The pumpkin plant has already produced two giant fruits, so I'll clip off the infected leaves and treat the other leaves with a preventative containing sulfur (stinky).

Baby Pumpkin

This little blurred blob of yellow is a pumpkin just beginning.

Pumpkin Arrangement

My talented friend Karen made this for me :)

Pumpkin Blossom

A pumpkin blossom...and not from my garden. My sole pumpkin plant never produced anything this year. This showy flower is from the fire station pumpkin patch in our neighborhood.

Poor Little Pumpkin

Finally, one of the pumpkin seeds germinates....and it doesn't look very happy about it. The weather is just too cool. This will be a Cinderella pumpkin when it grows up.

Pumpkin Harvest...and a Pig

We harvested pumpkins from the garden beds this week - and here's our bounty. We got four, one of the pumpkins near the pig was our find at the nearby fire station pumpkin patch. I love the two Cinderella pumpkins with their flat shapes and orange-y red color. My daughter was in charge of those from the day she pushed the seeds into the starter pots.

Pumpkin Surprise

We headed out to the garden beds last night to harvest our pumpkins, and hiding near the air conditioning unit was this one. This volunteer pumpkin plant can be traced back to a rotting pumpkin I placed in the area two years ago on its way to the garbage. We found three "on purpose" pumpkins and I'll showcase the harvest tomorrow. And although this one is green, they often turn orange after they're harvested.

Cinderella's Fairy Godmother Would be Pleased

One of the Cinderella pumpkins (Rouge Vif E'Etampes) surrounded by culinary thyme. This is not an eating pumpkin, strictly ornamental or to be 'bibbity-bobbity-booed' into a carriage.

Pumpkin Teenager

One of the baby pumpkins is growing up!

Pumpkin Baby

So far, no squash bugs have attacked this pumpkin plant. But I've heard squash bugs are a-plenty this year, so I keep checking every day.

Snow on the Pumpkin

More snow today. About three inches should fall tonight.

Pumpkin Harvest

Well, this is our pathetic pumpkin harvest. I had so many seedlings, and so many squash bugs. We have a green "volunteer" pumpkin, one that was supposed to be a giant, and one Cinderella pumpkin. Say "hi" to Sweetie. She was very interested in the harvest.

Mini Pumpkin

This is not a true mini pumpkin variety, just a really small pumpkin I found growing beneath a mass of silver tidal wave petunias.

The "Volunteer Mystery Plant" is Bearing Fruit

Mystery solved...it's a pumpkin. A volunteer mystery plant showed up in my front yard, and although I did plant a pumpkin plant, it wasn't this one and not in this location. This plant had spectacular blooms, you can see one here.

Pumpkin Peeking Through

A "Cinderella" pumpkin peeking through the landscaping in front. Our pumpkins in the back didn't fare so well, squash bugs invaded this year. We won't be planting any squash back there next year. We need to starve those horrid bugs out. I'm not generally a bug-o-phobe, but squash bugs and cockroaches give me the heebie-jeebies.