Garden Harvest!

We harvested the garden last week.  We did pretty well with the gourds, but lost several to the critters.  The deer had some fun with the pumpkins as well.  As some of you will recall, there is a story that goes along with these pumpkins.  Every few years, I go all out and decorate my house with pumpkins, straw, corn, gourds, etc.  Two years ago, I bought several pumpkins and a black cat to decorate with.  I love the goofy look and mismatched eyes on this cat.



In our yard, we have a little “garbage” pile where we throw our leaves, sticks, and other yard waste.  Last year, DH came to me in August and said “remember that $100 you spent on pumpkins last year”?  (I did not spend $100 on pumpkins).  After Halloween, he put the pumpkins in the yard waste pile and the pumpkins made it through a hard Michigan winter and grew new plants without any help on our part.  We got 5 pumpkins out of those plants.  So, we threw them in the yard waste pile again last year.  This year, same result only they were HUGE pumpkins.  They have to be 24-26 inches tall, and are very heavy.

Here are my pumpkins this year.

The gourds that I planted came out pretty cool too.

 














I just love coming home and seeing this arrangement on my porch.  This year, we’re going to throw the pumpkins and the gourds into the yard waste pile.  We’ll see what happens next year.

Karen

Morning Glories!

When DH planted morning glory seeds at the beginning of the summer, we had no expectations. We'd never tried planting from seeds before, so we figured we would just water regularly, and see what happens. OMG! The morning glories are beautiful. I find myself checking the deck each morning before I go to work to see the flowers. Here are some pictures.

The large sunflower seeds finally bloomed. Does anyone know if we can collect seeds to plant for next year, and how that works?



And we have a watermelon! Imagine that!! The pumpkin is from the self-seeding in the composte pile from last year, and it is entirely God's doing. We didn't do anything to the pumpkin patch except watch it grow. There are 4 large beauties, just like this one. The pumpkins we did plant didn't do much...

I never knew how much fun it was to watch these things grow!!

Take care,
Karen

Garden update

Those of you who followed myquiltblog may remember the story of the pumpkins that we threw out in the compost pile two years ago, and they self-seeded into pumpkin plants the next year. Well, we did it again last year, and here is the result. We have several pumpkins!

This pumpkin is pretty large. All we need now is for it to change colors. But I don't want it to be ready too early...

This year, we intentionally planted several varieties of pumpkins and gourds. The result is mixed. There are several plants with flowers, but I don't know if they'll have time enough to grow. We'll see.

We also planted these morning glories. No flowers yet, but it sure is interesting to see the way the plants grow and attach itself to the arbor that we placed behind the pot.

We have several tall sunflower plants, and the big yellow flowers are not ready yet. But the darker-colored sunflowers are lookin' good!

Take care,

Karen