The Great Pumpkin cometh!

See? I have FOUR pumpkins! Five, actually, but the other one is on a different vine at the other end of the garden. These ones, there are three on one vine and one on the other.


This is the Chief Pumpkin, the first and the largest one (in the background in the second photo above). Now it has two more pumpkins on its vine. One is a good size and might make it to orange colour if it doesn't freeze too soon. The other one is about 3" across and won't make it, and I really should remove it, but I think it's too cool to kill it. You can see it in the bottom left corner in the first picture.

What I should also do is harvest the Chief Pumpkin, as it's been fully orange for some time and is probably ready. The thing is, I have a friend who claims to make the world's best pumpkin soup and is indigent, and I've been meaning to give him this pumpkin, but I haven't seen him in weeks to check if he would like a pumpkin. Also I have to get the seeds back. This vine flowered way earlier and produced way more than the other vines from the same seed packet. I want to reseed it next year for sure.

For next year, I also have some Lumina and Neon seeds, and we're building a greenhouse at the Community Gardens. Although by "we" I don't mean me. I had planned to volunteer on it, but the people who have put themselves in charge of the project annoy the crap out of me (and their dog bit me), so I'll volunteer for something that doesn't involve annoyance. But anyway, where I was going with this is, starting pumpkin seeds early in my house didn't help much because I don't have enough light or room to keep pumpkins for more than two weeks, so they got leggy and then the wind broke them when I bedded them out too early. But for next year, I can start them in the greenhouse, and hopefully that will be more successful.

If at first you don't succeed, there's always blackmail

This is my latest pumpkin. I have three Baby Pam vines, and this one kept producing female flowers and letting them die. So I said I'd just pull it out, since it was just wasting space. But when I went yesterday, finally it had one bud growing instead of shrinking. And if you think it's just a coincidence, you don't know plants. They know everything.

On the other hand, the one Lumina, which is a semi-bush type, hasn't even put out any female flowers yet. It looks like there is one female bud coming, but that's pretty pointless this late in the year. So that one is probably going to get pulled for real.


Meanwhile, this is my second pumpkin. It's two weeks old and bigger than my fist. That's not much for a pumpkin, but it's bigger than any pumpkin I grew up to now, except for:


My first pumpkin. It's turning orange! It's turning orange! It has four more weeks to put on some weight. I hope it gets big enough to feed a few people. My friend Brian claims to make the best pumpkin soup in the world, so I'm hoping he can cook this bad boy for us and we can have some friends together to eat it.

Next year we're supposed to have a greenhouse in the Community Garden, so hopefully I can start pumpkins way ahead of time.

Pumpy-umpy-umpkin!

20 July:


23 July:


27 July:


Wow. I hadn't taken a photo since this one because every time I looked I kept thinking "it hasn't grown at all". But when I opened this photo to look at it I thought "haha, look at the tiny pumpkin!" Clearly, it's time for another photo.

This is my lead pumpkin so far. There have been several other female flowers that I thought were pollinated, but then the fruit buds just shrivelled and fell off. But as of today, I have one other pumpkin that's clearly growing, and another that I'm fairly confident is growing.

Mmmmmmm... Pumpkin...

Meanwhile, in the vegetable garden

The vegetable garden, 3 June:


The vegetable garden, 8 July:


The vegetable garden, 20 July:


Well. That ain't not bad, actually. I never thought the d-ed thing would produce anything, but there's quite a bit of greenery coming up. I even got to eat the spinach that are in the foreground in the middle photo.

The cool thing is, for the longest time, my garden looked like crap compared to everyone else's, but now it's starting to be one of the better-looking ones. Partly, I think it's because I'm actually there every day, or every other day at the latest. Some people seem to garden in fits, a few days once in a blue moon.

Another issue is fertilizing. Many people have been listening to The Local Garden Expert and adding nitrogen to their plants. Then some of them put way too much nitrogen and burned their plants. But either way, nitrogen is not the answer in a vegetable garden. Nitrogen grows leaves and stems. If you're after lettuce, that's a good thing, but if you want your plants to bear fruit, they need... well, I forget whether they need P or K, but that's what they need, not nitrogen. So I've been feeding my garden with tomato fertilizer, once a week, as per the manufacturer's directions, and it does seem to be working. Consider the following:


A pumpkin! First of all, last year I didn't even have my first flower until July 20, the first female bud was August 2, and the first growing fruit was August 19. So I'm doing well for time. Second, this vine does not have a pumpkin, it has four. This is the most developed one, and the others will get eliminated later on to leave only the top contender, but clearly, pumpkins like it way better out there than on my balcony.


Plus, it's colonizing the rest of the garden. Booya!

Then, there is this:


A Brussels sprout or cauliflower (they looked identical back then) on June 17.


A cauliflower yesterday, July 20. They don't have heads yet, but considering how minuscule and fragile they were when I bedded them out, I'm pretty impressed that they turned into such monsters.

Also:


The peas have pods, and some of them (such as this one) are starting to fill out.


The red onions seem to be doing well, though it's hard to tell since the important part is underground. Most of them you can't see anything, I just hadn't mounded this one yet.

And most importantly:


It looks like a jungle. If you ask me, that's the main point of a garden. (Someone described it as "artistic". I think she was trying to be diplomatic.)

Flower #2

The giant pumpkin is in bloom. Oddly, the flowers of the giant pumpkin are quite a bit smaller than the flowers of the non-giant pumpkins. Maybe because it's early in the year and we don't have much light. Or maybe because Atlantic Giant, as far as I can tell, is a deformed mutant strain.

A pleasant surprise

I decided to repot my giant pumpkin, which is getting absurdly tall because of the lack of light. I figured it could go into Planter #9, where nothing else is happening. So I thought. #9 was supposed to be a holding tank for some of my perennials: one globe thistle, the "blue" geranium, and the Stargazer lily. But they seemed to be all quite dead. So I started digging. The old Stargazer stem is fully dead and had just a few spindly dead roots, as I thought. But to get the pumpkin in there, I had to dig almost six inches, and at the bottom, I found a lily bulb.

Seriously. It looked just like the other lily bulbs I had in the fall. Very fresh and healthy, as far as I can tell. Though of course I don't know much about bulbs. What I do know, is that it never looked like that when I planted it, or when I transplanted it, and it's much, much deeper than I ever planted it. So somehow, it dug itself down several inches, and then separated itself from the dead stem, and lay in wait.

These plants are getting creepier every day, I tells you.

In any case, I dug the bulb into the other lily planter. I hope it will flower this year, as the others aren't looking good. The one that bloomed before won't bloom again until next year. One of the other two got broken, and presumably won't bloom either. And the last one is extremely tall and convoluted. It's on a four-foot stake, but it looks badly scoliotic, and there is a hairpin turn near the top. I'm sure that's all just lack of light, and shouldn't prevent it from flowering, which I hope it will do in black, as it's supposed to, but I don't trust it. So, the Stargazer may be my best hope so far. I do have three more coming from my advance order of spring bulbs, and if I ever get my new credit card, I'm hoping to get another two.

(My credit card expired and the new one got lost in the mail. I had a new one sent, but haven't received either. So I can't shop online, until further notice. Maybe I should send a money order.)

Now the best thing about this isn't so much the Stargazer, but the hope that my peony might be also be lying in wait. You may recall I got a Shirley Temple peony root in the fall, and I put it in a planter. It hasn't done anything at all. No growth, but no decay either. I keep meaning to dig it up and see what's going on below ground, but that wouldn't do any good. And likewise Deng Xiaoping has been doing nothing ever since its leaves died off in the fall, but the branches are still flexible, therefore probably still alive. So I'm thinking, if the Stargazer can dig itself deep into the ground and lie in wait for months, so can the peony, and certainly a deciduous tree can do the same.

My potato sprouted!

I suppose you might say that my potato had already sprouted. The whole raison d'être of this potato is the sprouts. Without the sprouts, the potato would have met the grim fate of most potatoes. It would be, one might say, down the proverbial creek without a paddle. (That's not true. Our sewage goes to a lagoon, not a creek. And in any case, potatoes don't paddle.)

Right. Right. But the thing is, for purposes of my garden log, a plant is deemed "sprouted" when it breaks the surface of the soil. Thus as of yesterday, I can proclaim my potato officially sprouted. Bansai!

You know what's amazing? In order to get from where I buried it to the surface in four days, it would not only have to grow at least 60 times faster than thitherto, but also change directions, because two of the sprouts were not previously growing upwards. Now the change in the growth rate could arguably be attributed to being in soil, with water and nutrients, but that doesn't explain how it knew which way to grow. Potatoes have no inner ear and no brain. How can they have better proprioception than me?

Ok, if you knew me, that's probably a dumb question. I'm pathetically challenged when it comes to proprioception. It's still pretty sad being outdone by a potato. And again, there is this creepy increasing awareness that plants, through some unfathomable mechanism, have a certain degree of consciousness. I used to think I was playing God with them. Then I thought, plants are like drugs: you think you control them, but they control you. Now I'm starting to suspect they might have volition. And with volition, sooner or later, come sinister motives.

Anyway.

You know what else sprouted? My giant pumpkin. I planted the first seed on 11 February. It failed. I planted a second seed on 4 March. It was starting to get white mold on it, so on Friday I tried to dig it out, but it resisted, suggesting that it had a root. So I watched it closely through the day, and I could have sworn it was rising gradually out of the ground. Sure enough, Saturday morning the whole seed was above the ground, then it started to split, and then the baby leaves started to emerge. As of today, it's about four inches tall and trying to shed its shell. That gives it 189 days until last frost. If it can't bear fruit in 189 days, it should be extinct.

Oh no you di'n't!

Recently, I've gotten in the habit of taking two little boys out on the weekends. They're nine years old, twins, and have autism. One speaks quite well and doesn't move very fast. The other speaks very little but moves like the wind, and is actually smarter than the average kid, as far as I can tell. He can outwit me, anyway, whereas I can outwit the "neurotypical" kids.

This morning, I took the fast one to watch minor hockey, because he likes it, and left the other one at home, because he doesn't. So we hung out for about two hours, ending up at the hardware store. Taking him to any store is a challenge because he will disappear, or climb up the shelves, or put something in his pocket, or who knows what else; but he was really good all morning and listening to me, so I decided to take him anyway.

Everything was going well as I followed him around the store, just watching that he didn't put something in his pocket... and then he went into the garden section, mostly by mistake, and there I saw...

SEED RACKS!!!!

The seeds are here! The seeds are here! Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

I was so excited, I just about walked away from the boy to go look at them. Which might not have been a disaster, because he's actually a pretty good kid, but the whole point of me taking him out is that I'm fast enough and focused enough to keep an eye on him, thus making it possible for him to act natural instead of being constantly restrained or in trouble. So if I'm going to wander away from him, that rather defeats the purpose of me spending time with him.

So, we left the store with one toy for him and none for me.

Then I went home, had a nap, went to the library, and then I walked back to the hardware store and bought some seeds. Autistic kids and I have this in common that we don't give up easily.

Thus the first seeds of 2012, not counting the few I got by mail late last year, are pansies (Swiss giants mix) and... Atlantic Giant pumpkin. Had I stuck to catalogue orders, I might never have ordered Atlantic Giant, but unlike all previous years, the OSC display at the store had some. So now I have some.

Now the question is, what do I do with them? By my calculations, they need to be seeded around 1 April. That's... seven weeks from today. Seven weeks! Woe! I don't want to wait seven weeks!

I think I need to get another one of those nice deep planters like I have for Za 7, and plant one pumpkin seed now, and the rest later. Or maybe get eight nice deep planters, and plant one pumpkin seed a week from now until 1 April, and see what works best.

And this is how my gardening expenses grow into the hundreds of dollars, "just two bucks" at a time.

The Great Pumpkin Problem

I may have mentioned, repeatedly, that I have a problem with pumpkins. Namely, they don't grow fast enough. But the cool thing is, so does everybody else here. So it's not me being inept at pumpkins; there really is a pumpkin problem here.

While looking at the times-to-maturity of different varieties, to see when I should start them for a mid-August maturity, I quickly realized where the problem is. The average time from transplant to maturity, between all the varities offered by my supplier, is 96 days. That means having to transplant out on May 11.

Haha, very funny. There is still snow on the ground on May 11. Nothing can get planted out until the end of June, and keeping a pumpkin indoors for two months is a nuisance, as they spread over the floor like... fleash-eating aliens, or something.

I must think of a solution.

First frost

Last night it was so cold I decided the lemon trees couldn't stay outside, frost or no frost. And just in case, I also brought in the English daisies and covered up the Last Pumpkin.

I was right. There was frost in the night. Yay me!

So far, nothing outside seems affected. Most of what's out there is supposed to handle a fair amount of cold and like I said before, some of them will bloom until late October. As for the Insane Ones, they may be tropical vines, but they don't care. They're invincible.

Still, it's the beginning of the end for the 2011 garden. It's been a good one. Thank you, plants.

After the storm

Last week we had a storm of wind and rain that lasted three days. Some of the rain looked suspiciously large and white. I thought the garden would be done for, especially the pumpkin. After the storm the temperature dropped to 5 C (41 F).

And then, it went back up to 20 C (68 F) and sunny.

Of course.

Even though first frost is statistically September 15, there is actually plenty of time left. Last year I still had many things blooming by the time I left for Calgary on October 21. In 2009 there were still things blooming when I left for Yellowknife on October 19. So, I should still have at least a month and a half of flowers.

Sadly, this doesn't apply to my pumpkin, as pumpkins allegedly need 20 C to grow, and don't take kindly to frost. But at least it still leaves plenty of time for the things that have not flowered yet, including but not limited to:

• hollyhocks,


• marigolds,


• flax (still alive, though growing upside-down because of the crowding),


• Darth Plant,


• and the following varieties of morning glories:
  
  • Heavenly Blue
  
  
  • Kniola's Black Knight
  
  
  • Chocolate
  
  
  • Flying Saucers
  
  
  • Crimson Rambler
  
  
  • Double Sunrise Serenade
  
  
  • Pearly Gates

There are a few that I don't expect until next year, and a few I don't expect at all, but over all, it's been a rather successful season in terms of the percentage of stuff that flowered.

Also, the new Adansonia za is almost through the surface, and the first lychee has a root. I boiled one of the seeds that hadn't cracked yet, but it doesn't seem to be any faster for it. And the pear trees are still numerous and healthy. Holly and apricot seeds are still in stratification. And I'm thinking of getting some catalpa seeds, but I don't have a supplier for them right now.

The lemons are still outside. They have not been watered since August 1 and are much better for it. The dieback stopped almost immediately when I stopped watering, and they have not expressed any desire for water ever since. They are still short on nitrogen, so I gave them some manure, but without water to mix with it, I don't think the nutrients are spreading through the soil all that much. I'm not planning on watering them again until they come inside, that way they'll be easier to move. It should only be another two weeks at most anyway. I think they've been quite happy on the balcony all summer, insofar that it's possible for a plant to be "happy".

What else... the chokecherries are still alive. They're not doing much, which is normal as they put on their growth in the spring. I've said that already. The passiflora vines didn't do well in the storm, I had forgotten about them and left them outside. There are still a few alive, but they don't seem to be getting bigger. Oh well. I wasn't really attached to them anyway.

And that's about it. I'm really looking forward to next year already. I have big plans. (In fact my shopping list for next year is up to $290 so far. Hmmmmmm...)

More reasons I'm single

Today I spent more time covering my fragile plants than doing my hair.

I stayed up until nine PM on a Friday night waiting for the sun to go down so I could cover my plants without depriving them of daylight.

I name my pumpkins.

There is a dead pumpkin hanging from my candelabra.

My lemon trees have the same birthday as Gandhi.

This causes me to wonder what famous person(s) share a birthday with my baobab.

I look it up and find amongst others: Ignaz Pleyel (the one with the pianos), Edouard Daladier, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nicolaievna Romanova, Thabo Mbeki, Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and Uday Hussein (Saddam's son).

I recognize most of the political figures on the list and only two entertainers. The youngest person I've even heard of was born in 1964.

I have a blog about my garden.

The last pumpkin

My final pumpkin is already bigger than its ill-fated predecessor and looking healthy, but the nights are getting cold. Actually, the days are getting cold too. By pumpkin standards, that is, not compared to winter temperatures. So, I don't know how much more growth I'll get out of this little dude.

For next year, I'm hatching a new strategy. I can think of three options.

1) No pumpkins.
2) Atlantic Giant pumpkins. If I can grow a 2" pumpkin from a regular variety, maybe I'll get a full-size pumpkin out of the giant variety.
3) Early-maturing regular-size pumpkins. That's probably the smarter thing to do, right? This variety, Small Sugar, is 100 days, but some fast pumpkins mature in as little as 60 days.

Something to think about over the long dark winter, anyway.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!

I SLEW MY HEAD PUMPKIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!

.

.

.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!!!!!

I slew my head pumpkin.

The candidate on the north vine had died, it was in my way, and its leaves were tattered and brown from being in the way of traffic all the time. I decided to cut it off. But I made a mistake while trying to trace the vine to its origin, and cut off the east vine instead.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!

He was a prince among pumpkins. The Jack Layton of pumpkins: a true leader, dead before his time.

On the other hand, it appears on closer inspection that there were brown spots on the bottom, so maybe it was gonna rot and die anyway.

I still have one left, on the south vine, which was the healthiest vine anyway. This candidate is sitting on the lawn, where I had also recently relocated the late Great Pumpkin. Maybe the lawn is too humid for them. So, I put a chunk of rigid insulation under the Last Pumpkin. But even if that one makes it, it's eleven days behind the late Great Pumpkin, and that matters this late in the season. But maybe with only one vine instead of three, it will grow faster.

Well, it was only a pumpkin. I know a guy who ran over and killed his own daughter while drunk-driving. All I did was kill my pumpkin.

Pumpy-umpy-umpkin

This is my lead pumpkin. It's firm and firmly attached to its stem, and shows no sign of wanting to let itself die. On the other hand, if you read my interview in the local newspaper, where it says the pumpkin is "the size of a baseball", that's not true, nor did I say such a thing. This here pumpkin is a total of two (2) inches in diameter. World's smallest baseball... but it's the biggest pumpkin I've ever grown yet. I hope it doesn't die soon.

There are two more candidates, one on the north vine, pollinated August 19, looks like it's gonna die, and one on the south vine, pollinated yesterday, no idea yet whether it will live or die. And I've been saying the boss pumpkin is on the "south" vine but it's really on the east vine. So now I have one candidate on each vine. But really I'm gonna chop two off pretty soon. It's only three weeks to first frost, there's no point keeping these late-blooming pumpkins around.

Keep up the good work, pumpkin!

This is the current pumpkin candidate, six days after fertilization. It's in good health and I think it's even getting bigger.

Meanwhile, another female flower opened on the north vine, hidden between Insanity Plant and the Jungle, and although I had been keeping an eye on it, I didn't check this morning, and so I never noticed until after ten, when all the flowers were already wilting. I did get it fertilized, but that goes to show how high-maintenance these things are if you don't have a good supply of pollinating insects. The window of opportunity is about four hours, I think.

There is one more female bud on the south vine, which I expect to open tomorrow. Then I'd have three candidates. I hope one of them gets growing fairly aggressively so I can whack everything else; it would cut down on competition. Inshallah. (I'm a Lutheran, but Muslims have way cooler sayings than we do, so I use theirs.)

My pumpkin died

I looked at my pumpkin on Wednesday and it looked like this:


Hmmmm... That doesn't look right. So I poked it and it fell off the vine. Poop...

There is one more female flower bud that looks promising; if that one fails, I'm gonna get rid of them for this year. Maybe next year I'll get a plot at the Community Garden, then they'll have more room for their roots and they can pollinate with other people's plants while I'm away.

Female pumpkin flower!

I can't believe my pumpkin flower went from this:


to this:


in just three days. Especially while the aster buds have taken two weeks so far to open halfway. "They" should cross asters and pumpkins, see if they can make a fast-opening aster. Or a bright pink pumpkin. Baaaahaha! That would be awesome.

Anyway. I only have two male flowers today. Since they're on the north vine and the female flower is on the south vine, I like to believe they're two different plants and I didn't just fertilize one plant with itself. Time will tell, I suppose. Not that I have any way to know whether a pumpkin is "normal" or horribly inbred.

The timing of this flower definitely shows why it's useful to pollinate by hand, though. Since it's cool and cloudy today, there aren't any insects of any respectable size on my balcony. In fact, I've only seen one wasp all summer, and there hasn't been a bumblebee up here in months. So if I had to wait for insects, I'd never get any pumpkins.

Notice also the difference between the female flower parts above, and the male flower parts which are like this:


I think I like plants a lot better than people.

Guess what?

There is a bud on my English daisies.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy!

None of the plants seem to have suffered from being divided and repotted, by the way. Everything I read about transplanting goes on about transplant shock, and I've yet to lose a single plant from repotting, transplanting, or otherwise interfering with them.


Also, a second variety of nemophila. This one is called variously Penny Black, Pennie Black, or Total Eclipse.


The first aster is almost open. They must be the slowest-opening buds in the world of flowers; at least on my balcony they certainly are.


Female flower buds are starting to mature on the pumpkins.

And also, there are flowers in planter #14.4, the shady end of the Wall of Insanity. And they're Stars of Yelta. Of course. And while I appreciate their speed, I wouldn't mind to see something else for a change. I really need the other varieties to get happening so I can collect seeds before winter.

I was right about the pumpkins

I googled it and indeed pumpkins produce male and female flowers on the same vines. According to my sources, the male flowers start about two weeks before the female flowers, so it's normal that I'm not getting any females so far. They should start in about six days now. And inadequate pollination is indeed a cause of poor fruit production. So I don't need to pollinate anything now, just wait until next week for the females to show up.

I learn something new every day.