The Pumpkining. It begins.

I messed up.

I don’t know if you remember, or even read this bit last year, but I had a whole Thing where the front yard started growing some kind of mystery plant out of nowhere, the guy who helps us out with cutting the grass identified it as a kind of squash, and it ended up being a pumpkin vine that produced a large (large) number of beautiful and delicious little sugar pie pumpkins.

I didn’t save the seeds from those pumpkins because the flowers were open-pollinated and I am afraid of toxic squash syndrome. (Long story short, if you grow any cucurbits from seeds that you’ve saved, never eat any that taste weirdly bitter.) I did want to grow more pumpkins since they seemed to do so well, so I bought a little packet of seeds.

I figured I’d plant all of them just kind of wherever. Not all of the seeds would germinate, because nature is unpredictable like that. The ones that did would likely have to fight for survival, because I don’t spray for anything. I don’t even really water stuff. The most I do is wipe down leaves with pest eggs on ’em, and I barely even bother with that unless the eggs are from an invasive species.

So, knowing that these baby pumpkins would have to fight for their tiny lives, I planted all of the seeds.

And they’ve all sprouted.

And they’re gaining strength.

Their stems are plump and sturdy. Their secondary leaves are uncurling. They’ve started to develop the fine, stiff spines that protect their leaves and stems from predators.

Where one pumpkin vine gave me more pumpkins than I could handle myself (and pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie, pumpkin bisque, pumpkin sauce), I am now facing about twenty.
That could be hundreds of pumpkins.

I wish I could say that this is the first time that something like this has happened, but it isn’t. I have a track record of vastly underestimating plantlife. Just ask the Passiflora incarnata growing up my porch.

I could pinch off the weakest ones, but none of them actually seem… well, weak. They’re thriving. Living their best little green lives. Just absolutely vibing out here.

I might just have to let them have at it.
Let the yard be a little pumpkin Thunderdome for a bit. May only the strongest survive.

Failing that, I’ll be stealthily abandoning baskets of unwanted sugar pie pumpkins on people’s porches by August.