Garden Update

I know, I know. I haven't posted pictures in a while. My laptop is off getting a new keyboard (juice mishap...) and I haven't installed "Hello" on my clunky old desktop machine yet. I really ought to do that soon, it's going to be another month or so until I get my laptop back (sent it off last week and have yet to get a call or letter about the repair costs so I can aprove them).

The pumpkin plant is looking really pathetic. I think it has devloped "powdery mildew", or at least some sort of fungas. The leaves are covered in white stuff and dying off.
I have 5 pumpkins in various stages of maturity. The oldest looks like it will be at the peak or ripeness any day now, the youngest still green and smallish.
There is technically a 6th pumpkin. A couple of female flower buds bloomed this past week, one fertalized and is growing. It is on a vine I was going to cut up for clones though and I'm debating about letting it grow or not. Oh, it's also growing on that evergreen bush I mentioned earlier, which is another reason for not letting the pumpkin develop.

The sunflowers are doing well. Two tall yellow flowered plants have flowers blooming. The bees are making freaquent trips to them, and a squirl has already taken a chunk out of one.

I've collected over 200 sunflower seeds from the red flowered plant beside the backdoor, about 150-200 cosmos seeds (in orange, yellow, and yellow with orange sripes), and several dozen assorted seeds from allysum, violas, and plants I don't know the names of.
I'm wating for the pretty pink flowered garden balsam seed pods to mature so I can collect seeds from it. I'd like to plant some in the front yard next year.

We have pumpkins!

Note that last letter in the titile. S. We have more then one.

I'm thrilled. I think we have 5, but it might be 7 depending on whose count you go by. I personally saw 5 so those are at least confirmed. I'll count again tommorow to see if I can find the other two my sister thinks are there. I supsect that she was including a couple of the ones with the flower still attached.
Of the 5 confirmed to exist pumpkins, it's looking like they will easily be as big (bigger?) as the larger pumpkins sold for carving for halloween.

The plant suffered a bit of tramua today. We had to move a couch out of the back door. The plant is right beside that door and crosses the steping stones to it. We trimed away some leaves hoping to make it easier to walk over it without dropping the couch on it. It still suffred some crushed leaves anyway, but no vine damage. Another couch and a loveseat (old peices from upstairs) have to be moved in through that door later and hopefully that won't hurt the plant too much either.

As for the cuttings, two are doing well, some are so-so, and the others suffred from neglect and died (I forgot compleately change out the water in a vase that had a lot of cuttings in it, the water went bad, so...).

Speaking of cuttings, some side vines are heading towards the pool (a few inches from being in the pool) and over the evergreen bush again, so I'm pruning tommorow.

Pictures later.

Container pumpkin growing

I just read something interesting in the Pumpkinnook newsletter. Apparently someone is sucessfully growing pumpkins (not just the plant, but the fruit too) in a container. They are growing it on a roof outside somewhere.
That got me thinking, would it be possible to grow and fertalize the baby pumpkins on my cuttings? I've got scads of them on side shoots growing into the bushes and across the lawn. If I brought them inside and grew them in containers and hand fertalised... would I get actual pumpkins from that? Worth trying anyway. Plus apparently trimming back the orig. vine will make for bigger pumpkins on it, acording to some reading I've done today.
Interesting, veeeery interesting... I def. need pots. And good potting mix. Asap.

Pumpkin cloning update

It seems my pumkin plant takes very well to being cloned. The end of the vine I covered in dirt in order to save the baby pumpkin that might have been fertalized is still alive and growing. The flower on that baby pumpkin hasn't fallen off though, and from what I have read if it was fertalized it should have. That now seperate plant has another female flower on it that I think might open this week, and there are males on the orig. plant that are about the same age, so I'm going to let the new plant keep growing.

In related news, there is a female flower that looks like it will open any time now, and again males of about the same age. I'm going to try fertalizing it myself so that I can be relitively sure that at least one of the females was fertalized.

Back to talking about cloning... When I trimed off the cracked segment of vine and tried to keep the severed end live, I figured since I was hacking off peices I might as well take off some other ends. I trimed a vine that was heading into a large flowering bush beside the fence, and a vine that was creeping across the steping stones and would likely be steped on anyway.
After trimming I had a few segmants of the pumpkin plant. Some I just left on the lawn with other pruned plants, two others I put in pots with dirt. The next day I was looking at the peices of pumpkin plant on the pile of prumings and decided to expriment with cloning a bit more. I picked out a few peices and cut them back a bit to remove dried out ends and to make the cuttings a more manageble size, brought two inside to put in water, and another I stuck in the dirt around the severed vine/new plant. All three peices are still alive and growing.
They all have their leaves looking perky, the flowers on them (both male and female) seem to still be growing (one male is pretty tall, I'd say a week or so from blooming), the curling tendrals are getting longer and are still curling, and I think I see the beginings of roots on the cut ends.
I brought in the bit of vine I just stuck in the dirt, it's in the glass of water with the other two.
The two in pots are looking a little patetic, but seem to still be growing, but the ones in water are doing better and I think I might just un pot them in a day or so if they don't perk up more.

So, out of one pumpkin seed I now have 7 geneticly identical pumpkin plants. Two planted in the yard, 5 cuttings. I plan to take more cuttings from more of the vine I have to trim back, keep them growing over winter, and then plant them around the yard to see if there is a better spot for them where they thrive but won't risk being steped on.

I'm going to need more pots.

The death of my garden. 80% of the seeds I planted either never grew, or started to grow and "vanished" within a few day or over the course of the summer. The slugs seem to have preferences for what they will eat. They do like yellow sunflowers, they don't like the dark red ones very much. They do like just about all of the wildflowers I planted, they don't like flax plants. Unfortunetly they do like pumpkins. My first potential pumpkin bloomed one day, looked fine the next, and the day after was hollowed out and fell off the vine. I've read I can protect my baby pumpkins by surounding them with sand. Apparently slugs don't like to call across sand. I have a bag of sand I plan to spread around some female flower buds tommorow. Hopefully some of those that ought to bloom this coming week will survive (both the slugs, and my feet...).

Pumpkins can be grown from cuttings (known as pumpkin cloning). Normally you'd burry part of the vine in a pot, wait a week or so for it to establish itself in the pot, then sever it from the main vine. This ability is also used to help grow bigger pumpkins; you can cover the vine in dirt to encourage the vine to grow roots to help feed the plant. Pictured here is the end of the vine that was left after I cut away the part of the vine I cracked. It was in the way anyway, running over a steping stone to the back door. If I hadn't stepped on it yesterday someone would have done so eventually. I'm hoping covering this end in dirt will help save that possibly fertilized baby pumpkin seen in the previous entry. Here you can also see an end of another part of the orig. plant, and some immature male flowers on the part of the vine I'm trying to save.

Female flower on my pumpkin plant. The bulb under the flower will become a pumpkin if the flower is fertalized. A male flower was in bloom at the same time, so I have some hopes it was fertalized. Weather it will keep growing or not remains to be seen. A few minitues after I took this picture I steped on part of the vine leading to it and cracked the vine. ~sigh~

Garden beside the back door. The leaves creeping over the grass are from the pumpkin plant. The ornge flowers at the left are Cosmos and a very short growing sunflower (Golden Hedge?), beside them is mystery plant 1, and the purple flowers on the right of the picture is a plant like mystery plants 2 & 3. I think the sunflower is called Midnight Queen, or something like that. Will have to check the package.

Mystery plant #3. It and #2 seem to have the same type of flowers, but the leaves are diffrent.

Mystery plant 2.

Front view of mystery plant #1.

The mystery plant's flower. Pretty, isn't it? We don't know if it came from one of two packages of misc. flower seed mix, or just showed up on it's own.

The mystery plant's leaves.

tada

I decided to set up a journal for my pictures of our garden. The pumpkin plant in particular is rather enjoyable to watch grow. Enjoy!