As I took my weekly pumpkin pictures, I was able to ask the gardener a few more questions. The pumpkins you see above seem to be ripening to a different color. He said that they are all in the squash family, and cross-breeding can cause some color variation. They sure are getting big, though!
This one is turning orange, and you can see one behind it that I quit photographing several weeks ago because it ripened up so early and quit growing.The one below appears to be the largest, and it's vine is still green and healthy, so it should continue to grow for a while. We've been getting plenty of rain, too, to help it along.
7 comments:
You've probably answered this before, but what is the gardener going to do with these prize pumpkins? Will he enter one or all in a contest? Is there any way he can weigh them before they're picked? These just amaze me; any time I've tried to grow pumpkins they would start rotting before it was time to pick them.
I know he plans to take one to a contest, and last year he gave one to a family across the street from the garden who have five little children. Boy, did they have the best jack-o-lantern ever! I know he used a fork lift to put them on pallets, and then lifted the heaviest one into a truck. I don't know if he was able to weigh them. Don't forklifts have a thing on them that tells you how much weight you're lifting?
I love those darn pumpkins! They defy gravity!!
BTW, are these pumpkins edible? My mom used to make this insanely good pumpkin dish.
It always seems a bit weird to me that every year we grow so many pumpkins which promptly go into the landfill.
Your post reminds me that I need to look into organizations that collect the post-Halloween artifacts...
Cindy, I'll defer to Abbie at Farmer's Daughter blog, who says that the good eating pumpkins are small. That's what I always used for pie filling, etc. I've never tried to cook down a jack-o-lantern sized pumpkin. As to Halloween, at least pumpkins can go on the compost heap! Unlike all the plastic spiders, etc.
Joyce, do you happen to know what the large urn is for. It appeared a few weeks ago in the middle of the patch.
Robin, I don't know what he's going to do with the urn. It's HUGE! Kind of fits with the pumpkins, I guess. If I catch him out there, I'll ask him.
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