Dear Readers, the pumpkins in my garden are growing like
crazy! Visions of gluten-free
pumpkin pie and other tasty goodies are dancing in my head…
A few months ago, I planted some Sugar Pie Pumpkin seeds (Curcubita pepo) in the mulched soil of my garden and eagerly awaited the
first signs of life to spring forth.
At the start, the plants seemed humble and unassuming as they sprouted
from the ground, slowly at first.
Then before I knew it, the pumpkin vines began to grow rather
aggressively and travel all over the place, as if they had a mind and a personality
all their own. There were even moments
when I discovered a few pumpkin vine tendrils wrapped around other unsuspecting
plants or structures, all seemingly within a single day (I swear to you that
the plants in our gardens do crazy things when we’re not watching them J…).
In an effort to “use
the problem as the solution” as we say in permaculture, I began to direct
the vines, tying them to the exterior of the fence around my garden. This was an effort to give the vines a
place to go, as well as to hopefully provide at least a rudimentary deterrent
to the squirrels that have proven to be a menace in my garden this season.
While the prickly pumpkin vines have seemed to deter the
squirrels at least a little, a few of the varmints have still gotten into the
garden despite my efforts.
Thankfully, although they have continued to dig into the mulch from time
to time, they have largely left the rest of my mature vegetable plants alone.
I recently came across a pumpkin-growing tip that recommends
keeping your pumpkins directly off of the ground as they grow. According to my research, the moist
ground can potentially cause pumpkins to rot, so to prevent this, you can place
materials like cardboard beneath them.
I’m unsure why using materials such as cardboard as a barrier is preferable
to simply allowing the pumpkins to lay directly on the ground, since they can
both become wet after a rain, but I decided to use the cardboard method. So far, it seems to be working
sufficiently, with my pumpkins thus far remaining safe and sound.
Pumpkins have admittedly been fun to grow, despite the
vigorously growing vines that seem to take over wherever they grow. For about a month now, I have been
watching my “oldest” pumpkin grow ever larger on a daily basis. Then one day about a week ago, it
stopped growing and started turning orange. Now I must wait a little while longer until it is fully ripe
for the harvesting.
You never truly appreciate what it takes to grow something until
you grow it yourself. Once you
grow something for the first time, you treasure and savor it because you have
put forth your own resources, efforts and energy. In the era of cheap and widely abundant food that we have
been living in the U.S. for quite some time now, we have become ever
disconnected from what it takes to grow our food, and we don’t appreciate these
processes for the miracles of nature that they truly are. In the coming age of natural resource
scarcity and limitations that we seem to be entering, it is likely that many of
us will once again discover these food cultivation processes that our ancestors
knew so intimately. We may as well
have fun while we’re learning.
One of the best things about this process of growing food is
that we can literally taste the results of what we have worked so hard to
produce. My very first gluten-free
pie made from pumpkins that I grew myself instead of pumpkins from a can will
serve as my sweet reward.
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