As I
lurch my way through my new endeavors in gardening, one of the things I hope to
learn is what plants I am good with. I
know I cannot reach too-soon or too-sure conclusions about this: the choices (conscious and unconscious) that
I make are a small part of the picture relative to weather, soil, the whims and
vagaries of pests, and so on. However, at
this juncture I can state at least that there are some plants that it is not impossible to see thrive under my
care, and that is a start.
While
a number of my plants seem pretty happy in this benign growing season (people are
still shuddering about last year’s conditions, which on balance I now find
acceptable to have missed), one in particular is luxuriating, glutting,
glorying, and generally having to seem the best time of all, and that is the
pumpkin (the variety is Sugar Pie). I
have two pumpkin plants, and the smaller of the two I would consider to be
insanely out of control if I did not have its larger sibling to compare it to.
I’m
glad to see them doing so well not only in general but also because they had
such an inauspicious beginning. Both are
replacements, started from seed. I had
carefully grown bitty little pumpkin seedlings at home under lights, but they
never really took after I transplanted them.
First one perished, then the other. I had little hope for the replacement seeds; I
was mistaken. In general I did not have
much luck with any of the seedlings I started at home, so that is something for
me to think about and recalibrate for the future (or, you know, give up on,
depending).
My now-adult
pumpkin plants are so large and fat that they show no signs of slowing down
even when the ordinary annoyances of life such as powdery mildew crop up. The powdery mildew really bothered me; MY
PUMPKINS ARE HAPPY AND I DO NOT WISH ANYTHING TO CHANGE THIS. Ah well, the price to pay for not having a
drought or murderous oven-like temperatures this year, I suppose. At any rate, I filled a spray bottle with one
part milk, two parts water, and spritzed the mildew on a sunny day. This seems to have taken care of most of it,
and I’ll repeat the procedure in a week or so if needed.
Lots
of plants put out little grabbers – my peas, my mouse melons, my cucumber, my
nasturtium – but none shows the ferocity of my pumpkin plants. We’ll call it hugging and say it’s love. Here is a pumpkin hugging its neighbor.
This
pumpkin is hugging a tomato plant. I
have untangled it from its victim, er, friend several times and tried to
refocus its endeavors on the tomato cage.
The
nasturtium, after feeling so pleased
with itself for having successfully vine-conquered a plant label that I could
then not remove, even though the seed it was labeling never sprouted
(cilantro), got seriously out-vined. It
is adaptable, however, and realized that it could climb up the pumpkin while
the pumpkin was climbing over it.
After
all that, of course one hopes that the pumpkins will actually produce
something, other than leaves and grabbers.
I may be in luck! Or, the rats
and squirrels may be in luck – we’ll see.
I will fight for my pumpkins;
the powdery mildew knows this.
