Starting over

Time to start over with the pumpkins.

Before I started this blog, I had planted a batch of pumpkin seeds on April 16th in a small plot in my back yard. I tilled it, added 80 lbs of compost/manure from K-Mart ($1.87/bag), then put them in, just as the package said to, in a small hill of five seeds. Three had sprouted, two on top of each other and one about six inches away after it, I guess, rolled down the mound when I watered it. I later found two seed carcasses, dug up and chewed on by birds, in the nearby grass, but I still had three survivors.

Until today.

I was enjoying the mid-spring weather, reading a magazine on a blanket in the backyard when my three year old bounded up. "Look Daddy, I pulled weeds!". Normally I am thankful and appreciative of her help, but, as you can guess, she had pulled the pumpkin sprouts up.

Thankfully I had kept five more seeds, so into the ground they went. I scolded her a little, then made a small fence around the plot using some leftover vinyl siding. The first batch of seeds took about eleven days to sprout, so I'm really only about two weeks behind. There's still time.