Day 8 January 20th
This is the last pumpkin left from the previous batch. I didn't plant the pumpkins; they must have emerged from the compost mixture I added to the soil. I use a bokashi bucket. Each evening, all the kitchen scraps go in and are covered in a mix that looks like sawdust and smells of yeast. When the bucket is full I leave it for a couple of weeks, then transfer the mix to the garden. The scraps are still recognizeable at this point, so a stray pumpkin seed could have accidentally made it into the garden. For obvious reasons it's not a good idea to add seeds to the compost, but mistakes can be fortuitous.
Apparently two seeds made it from the kitchen to the vegie garden because two plants grew. One yielded butternut pumpkins, and the other the more traditional shaped ones. They could be Queensland Blue or Jap.
After I had picked all the pumpkins (about 7 in all), I was all set to pull out the plants. In fact I did start. Most of the leaves were pretty shrivelled and brown, but one stalk was sending out very healthy looking shoots and leaves, so I thought I'd leave it at see what happened. It thrived with all the rain and has re colonised the garden bed. It is not a butternut pumpkin.
This is the last pumpkin left from the previous batch. I didn't plant the pumpkins; they must have emerged from the compost mixture I added to the soil. I use a bokashi bucket. Each evening, all the kitchen scraps go in and are covered in a mix that looks like sawdust and smells of yeast. When the bucket is full I leave it for a couple of weeks, then transfer the mix to the garden. The scraps are still recognizeable at this point, so a stray pumpkin seed could have accidentally made it into the garden. For obvious reasons it's not a good idea to add seeds to the compost, but mistakes can be fortuitous.
Apparently two seeds made it from the kitchen to the vegie garden because two plants grew. One yielded butternut pumpkins, and the other the more traditional shaped ones. They could be Queensland Blue or Jap.
After I had picked all the pumpkins (about 7 in all), I was all set to pull out the plants. In fact I did start. Most of the leaves were pretty shrivelled and brown, but one stalk was sending out very healthy looking shoots and leaves, so I thought I'd leave it at see what happened. It thrived with all the rain and has re colonised the garden bed. It is not a butternut pumpkin.
No comments:
Post a Comment