I wasn’t kidding

I know much of my family is waiting to find out how our first week of homeschooling is going. I’ll only say, awesome, and leave it at that for now. I’m very aware that many don’t need a daily update, and I simply don’t have the time for that, but I’m hoping to share our homeschooling highlights on Fridays, just for fun.

Just to show you, though, that I wasn’t kidding about our pumpkin vine, I thought I’d share some pictures:

Yes, that is our pie pumpkin vine in the middle of our garden. You see, 2 summers ago, I was thinking that I hated spending the money on pumpkins at Halloween time, but they were just so festive, and not in a demonic way. Just fun. So I decided to grow a jack-o-lantern pumpkin vine. That year we got a handful of pumpkins. 3 good ones, at least. So the next year we decided to do it again. However, we got 19 pumpkins. (I know I’ve written this all before, I’m just reviewing.) We couldn’t get rid of them all and we made some delicious pumpkin things with it, but many went bad.

These are not jack-o-lantern pumpkins, but pie pumpkins which are a bit smaller with a yummier meat to them, since we’re now addicted to all of those pumpkin recipes that we tried last year. If you can see, the far right of the garden is my asparagus plants which are done for the year. A bit to the left of that in the back are the 10 tomato plants that we’re harvesting now. We have “healthy kick” roma tomatoes with twice some of the vitamins of normal tomatoes, and “big boy” tomatoes which are huge now, but not red yet. Beating back the vine away from these tomato stalks have been a daily job. The vines have wrapped around, grown inside, (Knut found 2 pumpkins growing INSIDE of the tomato stalk one day) growing over, under, around…you name it. There was a cucumber vine that was much smaller that got swallowed up by this pumpkin vine. It’s under there somewhere.

This is the left side of the garden. The vine overtook the broccoli plants, which are fortunately done, but we haven’t been able to get them out yet. It has grown over the beets and the green beans so we have to beat them back there, too. If you notice the dead plants to the far left, that was our peas which have been done awhile, but we’ve been gone and haven’t had a chance to take those vines down yet. Basically, Knut and I walk around the perimeter with cutters and just cut the vine to save the other plants, but the vine is just back the next day, wrapped around some poor plant, and invading the grass around the garden as well.

Today when I was walking around the perimeter of the vine, trying to contain it, I counted over 20 larger green pie pumpkins. That’s just the perimeter. We’re going to blow away our record of 19 pumpkins last year. Like I said, there will be enough for everyone!

Just for fun, I’ll show you the jalepenos I picked from the garden this afternoon. This was a new crop for our garden this year, but I was hoping to try my hand at making salsa, so we planted 3 of these plants. Fortunately I found out these freeze really really well. I need to find a salsa recipe or 2 to try out, though. I’m guessing pretty soon.