Last week I looked out our kitchen window and saw a woman using her cell phone to take pictures in our side yard. When I realized she was photographing my pumpkin garden, I was so grateful that I actually considered rushing outside and hugging her.
I’ve been a gardener in Moscow for 12 years and have never seen anyone else taking pictures of my pumpkins. It’s unlikely that people even noticed the pumpkins, unless they crouched at ground level next to the raised bed, peered under some sickly squash leaves, and squinted until they spotted a couple of orange ping-pong balls, sulking on top of the dirt.
In mid-October, I usually write a mea culpa column, chronicling this impetuous gardener’s inevitable descent from hope to humiliation in the pumpkin patch. Last year, though, the Garden Goddess must have sensed that I was ready to rip up my gardening hat — and she knew that, if I did that, she would have to find another source of amusement before Halloween. So probably she felt a bit frantic when she twirled her garden cultivator over my raised beds and conjured a harvest of 87 pounds of pumpkins. After that magical season, I considered giving away my leftover jack-o’-lantern seeds and retiring in a shower of pumpkin guts and glory.
Early in the new year, though, seed catalogs arrived in the mail, and I studied their photos of striped, pleated, rosy-pink and blue-gray pumpkins, as well as the classics in traditional shades of orange. A few weeks later, our son gave me a packet of EZ Grow Monster pumpkin seeds, with a picture on the packet and a description of hefty, homegrown pumpkins, each capable of topping out at 100 pounds. My fierce competitive instinct kicked in, and I resolved to produce a pumpkin crop that would beat last year’s record of 87 pounds. This year I would harvest the equivalent of my weight in pumpkins: 112 pounds. Frenzied already, I planted twelve varieties of seeds in 42 peat pots, one seed per pot, and planned to use one long raised bed as the pumpkin patch. The plants would have plenty of room in there, I thought, because my gardening history suggested that only a handful of seeds would germinate. I nearly fainted when all 42 seeds sprouted — but then I realized I would have to prepare two smaller raised beds to hold the rest of my magnificent crop.
Lee and I have worn a path from our kitchen door to the garden this season, monitoring the pumpkins’ progress, and I water them with soaker hoses nearly every evening. Now, at summer’s end, we see fat, healthy pumpkins turning color in the sun, particularly some varieties that carry fewer expectations than the EZ Grow Monsters. We’re also willing to crouch at the edge of the beds to check on the heavier pumpkins, which lie hidden below a tangle of vines. Although the EZ Grow Monsters themselves are far from monstrous in size, the leaves on their rambling vines measure more than 12 inches across. Other vines also have outgrown their garden space, draping themselves across nearby beds, invading the blueberry patch, winding to the top of the tiered flower bed or sprawling across our lawn. Several vines have twined themselves through the chain-link fence and made fat little pumpkins in our neighbors’ backyard.
Craig Staszkow, my editor at the Daily News, recently inspected the Rozen pumpkins. “You’ve got a couple keepers,” he wrote in an email, “though I have no idea how you will disentangle the vines to see which root produced which pumpkin. Could be a very sticky endeavor. I’d make Lee do it. Good luck and well done!” I thought I’d solved the vine issue back when the pumpkins were still seedlings. On the day I transplanted them, I labeled tall, banana-yellow plant markers and set each one in a straight line out from its pumpkin to the edge of the raised bed, so I could follow a vine back to the pumpkin, without crawling into the garden. This method worked great – until the pumpkin vines went rogue and I lost track of which went where. Now I have 20 pumpkins and about 200 pounds of vines. Despite the editor’s superb suggestion that Lee be the one to crawl among the sticky vines, it’s likely that their untangler will be moi.
Craft Rozen’s next column will include individual and group results of the pumpkins’ dramatic weigh-in. Email her at scraftroze@aol.com
