This is an excellent reminder that gardening is meant to be a gentle activity ... something to be approached with calmness and often more than a little delicacy (like when weeding around onions!).
I came home from work tonight to find, yet again, one of my rain gutters destroyed and in the middle of my yard. My neighbour's dog likes to chase chipmunks up them and chomps the gutters every inch it can then rips it off. It's happened many times ... they give me money now and then to replace them. But the bigger problem are the holes.
The dog digs and digs and digs, presumably to get the chipmunks. I refilled one hole several times last year and finally placed a huge pallet over the area. That stopped the dog for a while. Now it digs around the pallet. Clearly that is where the chipmunk(s) live. So I found one hole by the pallet and this hole was a few feet away so not sure what was going on here.
I had some work to do and proceeded into the greenhouse for a little harvesting work. The result wasn't too bad there ... I managed to pull off more than a few leaves and a couple of entire limbs while removing peppers. But then I decided to check out my one remaining pumpkin plant.
Some of you may remember that I lost many plants to frost and then more to cucumber beetle damage. This Dickinson pumpkin plant was the only surviving pumpkin plant so I've been babying it a lot until the two fruit started to ripen. Until this evening. Arrggh! I was just trying to lift and turn the pumpkins a teeny, teeny bit so that the same part wasn't always touching the ground to avoid rot. Well ... one came right off.
So, what I'd like to know is ... will it continue to ripen off the vine? If not, I assume there is something that can be done with a green pumpkin (and I mean cooking with it, not just carving it up for Halloween).
I'll watch it over the coming weeks and will keep it outside for a while to hopefully ripen in the sun (is that the right thing to do?!). And if you have the same questions as me then stay tuned!! I'll let you know what happens.
In the meantime, I'll listen to some mellow jazz or something ...
It won't really "ripen" but should be edible. It probably won't be as sweet and definitely not a keeper. If it's mature enough to pass the fingernail test then it may be pretty good - give it a couple of weeks to mature a bit more. If the skin is soft enough to pierce with a fingernail than it may just start to dry out and shrivel up. That's so irritating when things like that happen.
ReplyDeleteOK, well I won't plan to keep it long. I'll give it a couple of weeks but might as well cook it up sooner than later!
DeleteOne of my butternuts started to do the same thing, but I stopped as I noticed the vine breaking. It is only half on, but I guess that is good enough as it has started to ripen. Sadly my first Upper Ground Squash Sweet Potato Squash just broke off the vine on its own. All the ones setting are on the parts climbing up the fence. The butternuts seem to grow fine like that, but this one has really fragile vines.
ReplyDeleteMy plant was awfully fragile, just in bad shape. It actually came off very easily. Sorry to hear about the sweet potato squash!
DeleteOh, I hate when that happens! It seems that as the season progresses I get less and less careful with things like that. Hopefully your pumpkin still gives you some good eats, even if it's not the best it could be.
ReplyDelete