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Entry Date
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Nick Name
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Location
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Friday, March 10, 2017
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Maybaby
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Lewisburg, Ohio
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Entry 1 of 25 |
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Last summer while mowing the grass I noticed this gigantic weed near the front porch. I didn’t give it much though I just moved it over. A few weeks later, mowing again, this thing was back and huge! I mowed it down again, hoping maybe that would be enough to kill it. NOPE! This weed was relentless and 3 weeks later it was back and bigger than ever.
I thought for a few moments… I’ve seen something that looked like this before. I stopped mowing and pulled my phone out of my pocket. Google confirmed my suspicions. It was a pumpkin vine!
I thought it was cool, I left it alone and let it grow. I told my 7 year old son, “look there is a pumpkin vine growing out there.” He replied, “I planted that!” A memory from the previous October came flooding back. “Mom can I plant these pumpkin seeds?” I was busy, doing mom stuff, or maybe just oblivious. I don’t remember. I’m sure I told him he could, because that meant he would not be asking me to play with batman toys for at least 15 minutes.
That is how our pumpkin story began. I was impressed with this little pumpkin vine. The seed made it through an Ohio winter planted shallow in the ground. I had mowed it down . Didn’t water it. Mowed it again and yet it was resilient. It was late August, before we even realized what it was.
Soon the vine had flowers and shortly after it had a pumpkin! I was amazed. I started reading about pumpkins and came across a documentary on YouTube about a giant pumpkin grower. We live near Hamilton, Ohio and had attended operation pumpkin the previous year. We watched the pumpkin weigh off and enjoyed the band, rides and pork bombs, but I never for a moment thought that I would become infatuated with growing my own giant pumpkin.
Our pumpkin vine last year grew 3 small pie pumpkins. I called them pancake pumpkins, because they were so flat. It was a lot of fun and educational to show my kids the bees pollinating the pumpkins.
I have waited all winter and I am excited to try my hand at growing a giant! I am not expecting a monster this year, but wouldn’t that be cool!
I joined a couple facebook groups, and have avidly been reading the big pumpkins.com message board over the winter. A very nice gentleman in one of the facebook groups offered to send me some seeds. I decided to create this blog to share my journey with… well whoever wanted to read it, and to document my experiences this year, to improve my gardening skills.
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