Thinning the Crowd - Sort Of

When I had to restart the pumpkin patch in mid-May thanks to my toddler's eager hands, I planted five seeds, in three spots (two of two seeds and one of one, if that makes sense). The singleton never came up, but apparently to compensate for it, both seeds of one of the doubles just took off. Eventually, in the form of yesterday, it was time to pull one up, so logically I pulled up the weaker sprout. Weaker is kind of subjective, since it was still pretty big. Survival, Charles Darwin wrote, goes to the fittest. Three months after a package of ten seeds arrived in my mailbox, I have two vigorous sprouts, each with ten leaves. The biggest leaf I measured a little while ago was a heart shaped 5"x8".

Far from just thinning, yesterday was a time of rescuing. I pulled up an eggplant sprout from another section of the garden that had gotten almost choked out by weeds, and planted it in the corner of the pumpkin patch. It seems to be doing well so far, and I'm hoping to get a fruit or two off of it before the pumpkins in turn crowd it out.