2011 - the season begins

May 20, 2011 - I soaked the seedings and planted them. These are seeds from a 400# mother that Dave gave me several years ago. I'm going to plant them on a farm on 63rd where they have lots of room to grow and see how the season progresses.

We've already had 1 hail storm so it could be a pretty exciting growing season.

September 26, 2010 - Delicata, Queensland blue & Jaradale

Here's this year's squash harvest. The vines grew very well and my neighbor enjoyed watching it invade his front yard this summer. I just negotiated surface rights to his front yard for next year so I'm going to return to growing giant pumpkins. The game is on!

2010 Queensland blue and Jaradale heading for the street

Here's the vine as of 9/17/10

10/19/08 - The 2nd & 3rd place winners from Eastlake are.........

Here's the information from Paul in Eastlake with his and his neighbor's results......

Recall late start with 8 seeds which produced 4 plants, two plants (mine)produced a couple of softball sized, third plant (pix # pump3) produced average sized but very shiny, bright color, with color up most of the stem. 13.5 lbs, 35 inch circumference, about 8 inches height. Fourth plant we will call Eastlake #4 for now, (pix pump4) had good sun exposure, was 60 inch circumference, 65.4 pounds, 17 inches tall including stem Next year, earlier start, more sun,along with squirrel, deer & fox (for #4) strategies.


Everyone's pumpkins are beautiful. I'm disappointed I didn't have a contender this year, but I'm looking forward to making pies out of my Jaradales. Hopefully the interiors aren't blue like the exteriors.

10/13/08 - The Canadian winner

Here's our winner from Canada,

Drumroll please....

The big orange one Del is sitting beside (102 lbs, 71" circumference, 13" high)

The big ugly yellow one (108 lbs, 69" circumference, 15" high)

The medium orange one his son's posed with (70 lbs, 63" circumference by 12" high)

The small guy on the porch (42 lbs, 49" circumference, 10" high)

9/27/08 - The end of the Jaradale growing season

I caught the squirrel under the netting today amongst the pumpkins, so I decided it was time to harvest the Jaradales. I didn't want to take the chance of the squirrel starting to chew on them like he did the first one. We've had consistently warm weather and no frost yet but the growing season is definitely coming to an end.

I weighed the 4 pumpkins I harvested today, and they totaled 26 pounds. These 5 pumpkins came to a total of 35 pounds. No where close to my giant pumpkin last year.

08/28/08 - East Lake - Ron and Linda's pumpkin is thriving!!!

This plant is Ron & Linda's.... 14 inches from ground to top, will have to do a curcumference measurement.

09/05/08 - The cooler weather has begun

I've been quite negligent in posting this summer. July was unbearably hot. The cooler weather has started and fall is not very far away, so I harvested the oldest pumpkin today. It weights 9.6 lbs, not nearly as exciting as the giants. I have 5 in total. This one survived several attacks by the squirrels and scabbed over to heal itself. It survived much better than the Atlantic Giants from prior years. They just started to rot as soon as the outer skin was broken.