Pumpkins! (Yes, I know they're early, we'll get into that later.)

Well, this Spring I decided that I was going to take back the godforsaken weed patch on the side of our house that used to be a garden. 

Here's the whole sad, sorry tale. 

I had picked up the book Square Foot Gardening (which is wonderful, I wholeheartedly recommend it) and promptly got the vegetable garden bug. Which as you know from this post, and this post, is not unusual for me. I have always wanted a garden, but the tiny postage stamp of a patio in our apartment in California prevented me from having one. After moving to North Carolina we had plenty of space, but then resources were a problem, go figure.

So, anyway, silly stupid me decides that it would be fun to involve the neighbors and kind of have a little community garden instead of just putting in a bed for the kids and I. 

Baaaaaaad idea. 

It was basically the cause of WWIII around our little patch of driveway. One neighbor wanted to plan things out very methodically and had some very expensive ideas on how we should do the garden, and the other neighbor wanted to have the garden in now, and I mean NOW because the planting season's getting late and we needed to get everything in the ground yesterday. Well, long story short, he won. 

Now, not only did he want the garden in NOW, he also wanted it to be huge. I was thinking maybe a couple of 4 x4 ft. beds, but noooooo, he rented a rototiller and dug out a ridiculously huge 12 x 30 ft. monster of a garden. Sigh. We had one growing season and then he and his family moved out, leaving me with the monster. The monster promptly overgrew with weeds because I couldn't keep up with it, and I'm not talking about little itty bitty weeds, no, I'm talking about weeds in excess of five feet tall. 

Some of them were over my head. 

No, I'm not kidding. I really wish that I was. 

So this eyesore sat on the side of my house for over a year, and I battled with it when I couldn't stand the sight of the weeds anymore. Finally this Spring I had had enough. I went out, pulled as many weeds as humanly possible, got free mulch from down the street at the tree cutting place, built two 4x4 ft. beds with Alex and Sarah, and put in our garden this Spring. 

Here are some shots of how it looks now. 

These morning glories showed up on their own. Aren't they gorgeous?

The two beds went at one end, and since we had this ridiculous amount of space left, I decided to grow pumpkins. I figured why the heck not. If they grow then cool, we have pumpkins. If not, I've lost a buck or two on pumpkin seeds, no big deal.

They grew, oh boy did they grow. The vines grew to over six feet long and it was super cool when the blooms and all of the baby pumpkins started showing up. Unfortunately I didn't lay the mulch down thick enough and all of the weeds came back. Those weeds overshadowed the pumpkins vines and caused all of them to rot. So, we had a pumpkin harvest in August. 

Gee, I hope they make it until Halloween, but in the meantime we have all of our little pumpkins in a row on our kitchen counter. How cool is that?