Final week I regarded out our kitchen window and noticed a lady utilizing her mobile phone to take photos in our aspect yard. Once I realized she was photographing my pumpkin backyard, I used to be so grateful that I really thought of dashing outdoors and hugging her.
I’ve been a gardener in Moscow for 12 years and have by no means seen anybody else taking photos of my pumpkins. It’s unlikely that individuals even observed the pumpkins, except they crouched at floor degree subsequent to the raised mattress, peered underneath some sickly squash leaves, and squinted till they noticed a few orange ping-pong balls, sulking on high of the filth.
In mid-October, I often write a mea culpa column, chronicling this impetuous gardener’s inevitable descent from hope to humiliation within the pumpkin patch. Final yr, although, the Backyard Goddess will need to have sensed that I used to be prepared to tear up my gardening hat — and he or she knew that, if I did that, she must discover one other supply of amusement earlier than Halloween. So most likely she felt a bit frantic when she twirled her backyard cultivator over my raised beds and conjured a harvest of 87 kilos of pumpkins. After that magical season, I thought of making a gift of my leftover jack-o’-lantern seeds and retiring in a bathe of pumpkin guts and glory.
Early within the new yr, although, seed catalogs arrived within the mail, and I studied their photographs of striped, pleated, rosy-pink and blue-gray pumpkins, in addition to the classics in conventional shades of orange. A couple of weeks later, our son gave me a packet of EZ Develop Monster pumpkin seeds, with an image on the packet and an outline of hefty, homegrown pumpkins, every able to topping out at 100 kilos. My fierce aggressive intuition kicked in, and I resolved to supply a pumpkin crop that might beat final yr’s report of 87 kilos. This yr I’d harvest the equal of my weight in pumpkins: 112 kilos. Frenzied already, I planted twelve kinds of seeds in 42 peat pots, one seed per pot, and deliberate to make use of one lengthy raised mattress because the pumpkin patch. The crops would have loads of room in there, I believed, as a result of my gardening historical past instructed that solely a handful of seeds would germinate. I practically fainted when all 42 seeds sprouted — however then I noticed I must put together two smaller raised beds to carry the remainder of my magnificent crop.
Lee and I’ve worn a path from our kitchen door to the backyard this season, monitoring the pumpkins’ progress, and I water them with soaker hoses practically each night. Now, at summer time’s finish, we see fats, wholesome pumpkins turning colour within the solar, notably some varieties that carry fewer expectations than the EZ Develop Monsters. We’re additionally prepared to crouch on the fringe of the beds to examine on the heavier pumpkins, which lie hidden beneath a tangle of vines. Though the EZ Develop Monsters themselves are removed from monstrous in measurement, the leaves on their rambling vines measure greater than 12 inches throughout. Different vines even have outgrown their backyard area, draping themselves throughout close by beds, invading the blueberry patch, winding to the highest of the tiered flower mattress or sprawling throughout our garden. A number of vines have twined themselves by means of the chain-link fence and made fats little pumpkins in our neighbors’ yard.
Craig Staszkow, my editor on the Every day Information, just lately inspected the Rozen pumpkins. “You’ve obtained a pair keepers,” he wrote in an electronic mail, “although I don’t know how you’ll disentangle the vines to see which root produced which pumpkin. Might be a really sticky endeavor. I’d make Lee do it. Good luck and effectively finished!” I believed I’d solved the vine difficulty again when the pumpkins have been nonetheless seedlings. On the day I transplanted them, I labeled tall, banana-yellow plant markers and set each in a straight line out from its pumpkin to the sting of the raised mattress, so I may comply with a vine again to the pumpkin, with out crawling into the backyard. This methodology labored nice – till the pumpkin vines went rogue and I misplaced observe of which went the place. Now I’ve 20 pumpkins and about 200 kilos of vines. Regardless of the editor’s very good suggestion that Lee be the one to crawl among the many sticky vines, it’s probably that their untangler might be moi.
Craft Rozen’s subsequent column will embrace particular person and group outcomes of the pumpkins’ dramatic weigh-in. Electronic mail her at scraftroze@aol.com
