Rozen: My lazy pumpkins need a Halloween countdown calendar

My 34 pumpkin plants have spent more than two months in the garden, and they’re still all vine and no squash.

The vines themselves aren’t the problem. They’re strong and healthy, with dark green leaves and sturdy stalks, fully capable of supporting hefty pumpkins. The problem is that no pumpkins are fattening up anywhere along those vines.

As of Tuesday afternoon, which is my writing deadline for this column, I’d found only one puny pumpkin flower among the nearly three dozen plants. I should mount a giant calendar on an easel, I thought, and set it up at the front of the garden. Then I could mark a big orange X after my daily visit to the pumpkin patch, as a countdown to Halloween. Maybe then my future jack-o’-lanterns would realize they’re burning daylight.

For each of the past two years, my pumpkin crops weighed in at more than 300 pounds. A similar harvest seemed like a reachable goal for this season. To raise the odds further, I planted a couple of ringers. Who would expect that pumpkins named Pink Hearts and Porcelain Doll could bulk up to 20 pounds apiece?

Any day now, I hope, Moonshine, Green Eggs N Ham, Millionaire and Rembrandt pumpkins will set fruit and start showing their distinctive colors in early September: pearly white Moonshine; spinach and salmon-colored Green Eggs N Ham; hard-cash green and shiny gold Millionaire; peacock-blue, rose-gold and jade-splashed Rembrandt. One of last year’s magnificent Red Witch pumpkins, scarlet with light yellow stripes, weighed 26 pounds at season’s end. This year I planted Red Witch seeds again, left over from 2023, but their leaves are the smallest and vines the shortest of all the pumpkins. Maybe this hybridized variety of the classic Cinderella pumpkin grows weaker every year from inbreeding — or maybe the Red Witches have lost their magic.

When I’m not pacing the borders of the pumpkin patch, I’m often in the back yard with Duffy, our irrepressible Bernedoodle. He’s a self-appointed garden excavator, skilled at digging trenches around the hawthorn tree and determined to topple its trunk.

Recently, though, I found shallow holes and scattered dirt in a dormant tulip bed, with a few bare bulbs on the lawn. Duffy was prancing around with a bulb in his mouth, and I panicked. Tulip bulbs are toxic to dogs. Duffy’s eyes were bright, and his fluffy tail wagged with joy as he raced around me in circles, just out of reach, until he finally got bored and wandered off. Eventually Lee found the bulb, intact and unchewed, thank goodness, on the grass.

That afternoon we set up decorative wire fencing along the length of the tulip bed and around a double row of sunflowers. We knew Duffy could easily knock over the flimsy fencing, but our puppy understands that I’ll have a verbal nut-out if I catch him in the flower beds. I’d used small plastic markers to label the newly planted sunflowers — Autumn Beauty, Chocolate Cherry and Florenze — so that I could note which variety attracted bees and which color combinations were especially striking.

The next morning all 18 white markers had disappeared from the bed, and Duffy seemed extra-bouncy during our game of catch and fetch. As I moved around the yard, tossing the ball to him, I noticed white pieces of plastic strewn on the grass. I dreaded what I’d find in the sunflower bed, but the little fence was intact, the sunflowers looked perky and the Bernedoodle was proud of himself.

He’s a champ at nosing out a ball from between the rungs of our chain-link fence but pulling up 18 little white strips from the soil without disturbing the plants or leaving even a paw print takes an intense, goal-oriented focus. I wish the pumpkins had his work ethic.

Craft Rozen writes about gardening and family life from her home in Moscow. She may be contacted at scraftroze@aol.com.