Punkinstein's Progeny Progress Report

Again, my apologies for the latest lapse in posting recently. As I mentioned in the comments to the previous post, I've been sick again and work has ramped up considerably, thus cutting into my blogging time. Add in some exhaustion and a lack of inspiration and that will define a "Fall Funk" as far as I'm concerned ... *Sigh* Anyway, we're making do here at Casa IVG as Fall rams its inevitability full into our faces, and as I write, a round of thunderstorms is moving in...

While I was doing some work stuff today, I sent Fernymoss out with the camera (he was already mowing, so this made a good break for him, or so he said) and here are some of the sights he captured in the late afternoon garden. First off is, of course, her Highness, the Most Exalted Queen Pepa (Approximately) posing not so obediently next to our most recently discovered pumpkin in the back veggie garden. As you can see, she could probably care less that we wanted a cute picture next to the pumpkin, her attention was elsewhere. And, as you can also see, Punkinstein has a serious case of powdery mildew, which we're not too concerned about since it's late in the season, it's been rainy and moist lately, and the pumpkins seem to be doing just fine ... at this point I think we're assured of at least 3 decent sized pumpkins by Halloween ... now whether or not they are all perfectly orange, that remains to be seen....
Here's a shot of the original (first) pumpkin I discovered a while back, though now it's clearly in transition from green to orange and has some rather nice markings on it ... if it still looks like this around Halloween, I won't be bothered a bit, and in fact, I rather like this look!
And here we have the one that has been eluding us for a while ... the one closest to where Punkinstein originally established his territory, the compost pile. We both had figured there were pumpkins back there, but neither of us had found one, until today. Obviously, this one is more advanced than the others so far and will be a prime contender Jack O'Lantern within the next month! Really, this is a banner year here at Casa IVG that we can say we harvested both our own corn stalks and pumpkins (grown totally organically). At least we haven't been able to brag about that in previous years, despite better efforts to that end ... I guess sometimes if you do leave it all up to Chance, it does pay off from time to time....
And finally, here's Queen Pepa looking through the fencing that's supposed to keep her out of the back veggie garden, but doesn't really keep her out. According to Fernymoss, this was one of the few times he could get her to look directly at him while he was trying to get her to pose for the camera. But this is a typical Pepa look ...even with the weedy purple morning glory in the foreground. No matter what she was really thinking at this time, I'm sure that we can all speculate ... but I'm willing to bet that she understands that Fall and Winter are on their way, and it's just a matter of time before things wind down for the winter in the garden. We too, have to accept this and make our peace with the season. I'm just not willing yet, thus the Funk.

Acceptance coming soon, I expect.

Unintended Consequences (Sometimes are Quite Pleasant)

As the title of this post may have communicated, we hadn't quite planned on this happening, but when we threw the softening pumpkins from last Halloween to the compost pile, we should have expected as much! Actually, we're thrilled we have a virtually no effort pumpkin patch going back at the far end of the veggie garden ... the last time we tried pumpkins, they did fantastically most of the summer until later when the stinkbugs came in and sucked them dry, which we really hope doesn't happen this year.
If this little experiment we have going back in the veggie garden works out to (the most recently hatched) plan, we will have, at virtually no cost, our own Corn stalks and pumpkins for the fall display! We're even going to expand a little bit back there and plant yet another row or two of corn, because even though the first seeds were literally planted in MUD, they're doing great! So if we can eke another 2-3 weeks out of summer this year, we should have a second crop of corn. We'll see how that all turns out though... if nothing else, we'll have stalks!

Lesson learned: unintended consequences most often aren't pretty, but in this case they were! I just wish I had gotten pics of the many blooms that were open on July 3 (the day before I took these), they are truly beautiful and huge flowers!