My Peculiar Little Pumpkins

Halloween came and went in a flash this year – we carved pumpkins, dressed up in costumes, ate too much candy and put on a grand old fireworks show while camping for one night in the woods outside of Squamish! It was an exciting weekend of festivities, but what, you may be asking yourself,  ever became of those pumpkins I was growing? Well…

…the pumpkins were officially a failure! I have a few theories about what went wrong here. The most crucial element is that I started the plants too late in the season. I’m the type of gardener that’s been known to say “just plant it in the ground… something will happen!” and usually sticking to that mantra works just fine. But in all other cases, I’m not growing something for a specific due date like Halloween. Whoops! Lesson learned for next year: plant earlier!

These peculiar little pumpkins, which ended up being roughly thumb-sized, were also semi-starved for light (we only get sun from sunrise until 1:30 pm in the height of the summer), and eventually they suffered from mold too. Add to this the miserable November weather picking up, and it seemed like a good time to put the pumpkins out of their misery.

Container gardening on a patio eight windy stories high doesn’t always work out exactly as planned… but that’s okay. It’s still fun to watch things grow, and my mantra wasn’t all wrong – something did happen. Life in the garden goes on, and now I can reclaim the flower pot for some spring bulbs instead!