Beautiful Butternuts

Image via Wikipedia

I'm feeling so in awe of my Butternut Pumpkin plant of late. During the terrible series of heatwaves we had a while back it curled up it's toes and I really thought the 2 small pumpkins we got from it's earlier fruiting were all we were going to see.

However, the plant seems to have found a new lease on life and is booming away. Last night when I investigated, there are 6 healthy butternuts growing away with heaps of promise of pumpkin soup in the months to come!!!!

I love the way my garden constantly surprises me. Sometimes things don't grow or product fruit which can be disappointing but more often than not, I'm finding it surprises me in a more positive way and shows me the amazing resilience and determination to survive that many plants have.

Nature sure is an amazing thing!

Pumpkin Wrap Up

Image via WikipediaNow that the pumpkin season is well and truly over, I wanted to make a few notes on my first foray into pumpkin growing.

General Notes

• Pumpkins are not hard plants to grow. They're a GREAT plant to try for the novice gardener. I didn't find they took much effort or expertise to grow.
• Pumpkins are resilient. We had a heat wave which really knocked the pumpkin vines badly but they made a comeback as soon as the weather eased a little. They do NOT however, like frost (which is understandable given they're a summer/autumn plant).
  
• Pumpkins will take over the whole garden and half the play area if you let them - they need LOTS of space. Next year I'm going to grow them OUTSIDE of our back yard area where they can go nuts as far as space is concerned.

Butternut Pumpkins

• I couldn't believe how SWEET our homegrown butternut pumpkins were. They taste NOTHING like what I've ever bought in the shop. Last night my youngest said "thanks for growing pumpkins mummy". Isn't that cute? The kids certainly liked the homegrown version better than the shop bought version.
• From 2 plants we ended up with 10 Butternuts. I was really happy with that result.
• Grew from seed with no problems.
  

Jap Pumpkins

• From 2 plants (I started with 6 but only 2 survived) we grew 6 Jap Pumpkins despite the plants covering a MUCH larger area than the butternut pumpkin plants.
  
• These were later flowering than the butternuts and I don't think there were as many bugs around to help with pollination. We had quite a few that didn't ever develop into pumpkins. I deliberately didn't try to manually pollinate too much as I wanted to see what "nature" would do on it's own.
• We haven't cut into any of the Jap's yet as we've been busy consuming butternuts so I can't comment on the flavour.

Conclusions

I'm really happy with my pumpkin growing efforts, particularly for a first try. Since Jap and Butternut are our favourite pumpkins, I will stick with those two varieties. I particularly liked that they fruited about 3 months apart.

While we grew more butternuts in number, the Jap's were larger and heavier so for the same number of plants, the Jap would still have given us MORE in terms of kg.

The few things I'd like to do differently are:

1. Position. Move them outside the yard (to under our fruit trees that aren't planted yet is the plan).
2. Try Jap from seed. The butternuts grew from seed no problems. The Jap were seedlings. I'd like to try growing them from seed as well.
3. Manual Pollinating. To get a better crop, I'm going to try manual pollinating next year and see how that goes.

Hopefully our pumpkins will store well and will see us through a good portion of the rest of the year. My ultimate goal will be to NEVER buy pumpkin again. In babysteps of course. :)

Mammoth Jap Pumpkin

I picked my giant Jap this morning and it weighed in at 9.1kg. Not bad for a pumpkin that is usually on the smaller side. Thankfully I've been working on building my arm strength with my personal trainer. Otherwise I might have had trouble even bringing it in from the garden!!! LOL.

Here is a photograph of it next to a Jap about the size I would expect them to be.


I hope it's tasty because we'll get a few meals out of that one!!!! :-)

At this week's prices ($1.49/kg) that's $13.55 worth of pumpkin!!!! That'll help with this week's $25 challenge won't it.

Pumpkin soup, here we come. :-)

Surprise

Image via WikipediaI needed some "outdoor therapy" today so I went for a poke around the vegie garden. I pulled a few weeds and checked whether things are getting too eaten by bugs. A little bit of damage. Sprinkled crushed egg-shells around. Whenever we have eggs now I've been crushing and sprinkling the shells around the garden in the hope of deterring slugs and snails.

The Jap Pumpkin in the corner continues with it's prolific growth. It's well and truly taken over the swing set now. I've added potash a few times to encourage flower growth but I've been concerned that for it's size, we're not going to yield much in the way of fruit.

A few times I've tried to poke around amongst the vines to see if there are many pumpkins growing. But green pumpkins are hard to spot amongst prolific green leafery (I know, that's not a word but anyway....)

So today I'm poking around and I found this MASSIVE Jap Pumpkin growing. In fact, I found 2 that I didn't know were there. I was like a child on a treasure hunt. You'd think I had just found a couple of Freddo Frogs. LOL.

It was a nice surprise and brought a smile to my face. Which I needed. I do enjoy it when my garden surprises me. :)

I would have liked to take a photo to upload but I can't get very close and it's hard to hold the leaves apart, balance AND take a photo at the same time. I don't want to risk damaging the vine and cutting off my pumpkins lifeline. So I'm afraid you're stuck with what Zemanta can offer me by way of free photo's available online. I'll be sure to take a photo when picking time comes.

Can Jap Pumpkins grow too big? The vine connecting them is still VERY green so I'm figuring it's best to leave them grow for now.

Procrastination

I'm not in the mood to do much today. So I took my cup of tea and camera outside for a wander. We recently got some new baby chooks (they're not really chickens anymore but not fully grown either). The plan is to get a few each year. They should start laying before the other go off the lay and fingers crossed we'll get a reasonably consistent supply of eggs this way.



Here are some photo's of our older chooks. Aren't they just so beautiful???



Look at how barren and dry the ground is!!!! :(


And around the back of the chook house I found this!!!



It must have grown from a seed. Sadly, if it doesn't rain soon, I don't think we'll get anything off it. However, I have been constantly surprised and amazed by the tenacity some plants have to survive and thrive.

Pity my broccoli didn't have the same tenacity. The chances of it coming back are looking mighty slim. :( I was going to shove a few more seeds in today but do you think I can find the packet???

Oh well, I poked in a few peas instead.

While poking about in the garden I also found another zucchini growing on a plant. I thought I had pulled them all out but not so. We're not getting HEAPS from the garden at the moment but the few bits we are getting are certainly helping with the grocery budget at the moment. Vegetables seem to have gone through the roof in price these past couple of weeks.

We've always been regular carrot eaters but with carrots now up over the $2 per kilo mark, we might need to be eating some other varieties of vegetable. Or make pumpkin our primary yellow veg and carrot the secondary (given we have free pumpkins at the moment).

They're everywhere! They're everywhere!

Note to self: Find somewhere else to plant pumpkins next summer. I'm not sure the kids are too impressed about losing their riding path AND now the potential for the pumpkins to take over their swing set.

This is the Jap Pumpkin. I think there are actually 2 plants growing here. They're just starting to set fruit so fingers crossed we get a few pumpkins for all that mass of plant taking over the garden.

I have a spot picked out that will be better for growing them next year. It's OUTSIDE our main backyard area. Will need to purchase some compost or similar though as the area I'm thinking of is rock hard, barren soil.

In other "pumpkin" news. I've been surprised by a couple of bonus butternut pumpkins that were hiding from me. It would be nice to have a few to store for pumpkin soup over the winter months.

Butternut Pumpkins

Before we went away last weekend I hastily picked the 3 biggest butternut pumpkins just in case the excessive heat decided to prematurely cook them on my behalf.


I'm happy if this is all I get from the plant but the smaller two pumpkins left on the vine seem to have survived the heat-wave (I was able to lift them off the concrete onto the garden bed where it wasn't quite so hot) so I'm hopeful they'll continue to grow to a reasonable size.

Overall I think the garden has survived the heat-wave without *too* much loss and now that it's over I need to start thinking about what I'm going to plant when in preparation for a winter harvest.

Poor Lonely Males

It would seem my Jap pumpkin plant is great at producing male flowers with not a female in sight. :( It's a rather lonely world out there for all those lovely males just waiting and hoping for a female to come along so they can pour all their love into producing offspring.

Perhaps the poor little ladies are just avoiding this excessive heat wave we seem to be in the middle of?

In other pumpkin news, it looks like my attempts to help the young men along in their process of fertilising the butternut ladies has met with limited success. The plant seems to be coming to an end with just 4 pumpkins. Still, 4 pumpkins is better than none yeah?

How To Tell When Pumpkin Is Ready To Pick?

I did try Google first. I promise. You'd think information like this would be EASY to find on the internet. But it's like finding a needle in a haystack.

So can anyone please tell me how I know when my pumpkin is ready to pick?

I was going to post a picture of my ripest pumpkin for you but blogger won't play nice! :(

Edited to add: Think it will let me add a picture now.

Treasure Hunt

I think I've found a positive to a wild, wandering garden.

Surprises!!!!

Last night I poked my head into the middle of my corn crop, just to see how many cobs are left and whether I've missed any of the bigger ones. It won't be too much longer and the corn will be finished I think.

Lo and behold..... look what I found....


A CUCUMBER!!!!

Frightened off by the evil zucchini, the tiny tendrils of the cucumber plant wrapped their way around the tall strong corn stalk, hoping to somehow camouflage themselves amongst the greenery.

The clever cucumber has thwarted the efforts of the evil zucchini and will LIVE to see another day!!!! Yaaaahhhh for the cucumber!!!! :)

I also found some shrivelled up pumpkins so I guess it wasn't such a good idea for the pumpkin plant to hide amongst the corn as the poor fruit didn't get fertilised. Never mind, there are other pumpkins growing.

It has occurred to me that had I gotten myself a little better organised and manually fertilized, I may have gotten more fruit from the pumpkin and zucchini. However, I am a somewhat lazy gardener so I'm happy to see that nature has taken it's course at least some of the time.

Maybe next year I'll work on that.....