Pumpkin Chronicles Day 7

I’m pretty stoked about these pumpkins that are coming up in our garden. As I mentioned in an earlier post, last fall we had a couple of pumpkins on our front steps. After they sat there and got soft and mushy, we scooped them up with a shovel and tossed the remains into our garden area. At the time I was thinking it might add some nutrients to the soil. Then this spring when we cleaned up the garden in preparation of the spring planting, we found this! We weren’t sure what it was until we discovered that these little sprouts were coming up amidst a scattering of dried up pumpkin seeds. I think it was about a week ago that we first discovered them so I’m calling this day 7.

This is one little seedling that I separated out from the bunch. I figured they would do a little better if they were spread out a little, so I picked out three and planted them in a new area with plenty of space between them. I did that on April 25. On April 27 we got a good rain. This pic is from April 28 and the little sprouts have nearly doubled in size since being transplanted. I forgot to put something in the pic for a size reference but these little guys are a couple of inches high and a couple of inches across. I mentioned before that the sprouts each had two little rubbery leaves, but as you can see they’ve added a third leaf which is shaped differently than the first two. How interesting! Now that I know they can survive being moved I’ll try transplanting some more. As you can see from the first pic, there are plenty of sprouts here to make a pretty good pumpkin patch. I just know the Great Pumpkin will come this year!