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Novice actually gets something!



I have never grown giant pumpkins before. Heck, my wife is the gardener,
and my gardening experience mostly consists of  "honeydos".  "Honey do
this",  "honey do that".

Okay, add to that my late start.  I got my seeds from a friend who reads
this list (Hi DGS of Termite Manor in Menlo Park!) just as I was leaving
for a conference, and by the time I got around to germinating them, a fewof
you guys were talking about blossoms.  I contacted a pumpkin grower in my
local who said "Ah, you'll probably have enough growing season".

THEN, this list can be daunting.  Every day this list is filled with
stories of woe and disaster... borers, rot, blight, plague, famine, death
and war (I consider the phone company tryin to rip up the vines to be the
vegitable equivalent of war).   Each day I went out to check my vines I
expected to see naught but a little mound of green curcurbit mulch, and fat
insects, bacteria, or whatever.

But, I planted them, watered them, added a little fertilizer now and then.
At first they grew very sluggishly.  In fact, the tops of vines on 2 out
of 3 of them split open!     But eventually the joint beyond the split
threw down roots, and the thing started growing at an audible rate.

Then I began to dispair of pumpkin parenthood.   From the notes on this
list it seemed like these things were incapable of breeding on their own.
I envisaged haviing to buy little pumpkin pumps and stockings from
Victorias Garden Secrets, to entice the apparently shy and lazy male
flowers to do the pollination thing with the equally shy and virginal
female flowers.   I went out into my patch, laid on the ground and tried to
fathom the intricies of pumkin sex.  I peered at the plantly sexy bits.
They resembled, in NO way, the pictures I had spend hours perusing when I
was a young lad.   Was this a girl flower?  Is that a boy flower?

Dammit, I'm a chemist, Jim, not a botanist.  (the star trek fans will
recognize the original)

And now, I have 2 little baby pumpkins.  Okay, they aren't 80" OTT, or 100
pounds.  In fact, they are cute little lemon yellow golf balls.  But now I
am beginning to have hope.

Oh dear, isn't that when everything goes really wrong. When the stucker
starts to hope?
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