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| A photo of one of my very early baby pumpkins |
Well it’s been way too long since my last blog, almost two months. I was wondering what on earth have I done with the time, where have I frittered it away too?
But I have been doing things, and my garden has kept growing. My pumpkins are now almost all picked. The ones from the footpath were the first to be harvested, but not at my doing!!!! People had begun helping themselves! The first couple to go were just roughly pulled off the vine, so I guess they were walking past and just couldn’t help themselves (they did look fabulous). I wouldn’t have noticed them disappearing except I put little pieces of broken tiles under each one to keep them off the damp ground (last year I lost quite a few to rot, not having known this little trick) and those naked little tiles bereft of their pumpkins stood out! The next ones to go however were very neatly “cut” off, so I imagine someone bought their secateurs with them on their walk, an act of premeditation…so it meant if I wanted to enjoy the fruits of my labour, it was time for picking!
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| Using broken bits of tile keeps the pumpkins from rotting on damp ground |
I don’t like to pick the pumpkins that early. Normally I like to leave them on the vine until it dies back to the stalk leading to the pumpkin and then pick them. I believe that way the pumpkin gets the very last goodness from the vine. So my others within the garden stayed on for quite a bit longer and I now only just have a few left still growing or waiting for them to drain the last energy from their vines. In total I’ve had more than twenty pumpkins ( I forgot to count them all before I started giving them away). They add a feel of autumness inside the little blue shack, with their lovely creamy orange tones. Strangely even though some of them looked like they would turn out as large green pumpkins, and made me wonder how it was possible to produce such a variety of shapes and colours, they all changed to similar colours in the end.
The first made deliciously creamy pumpkin soup, a favourite as we start to get colder. One of course went to my parents, as they are still waiting on theirs. One made a lovely gift for my Nana, with a cheeky red ribbon tied around it’s stem, along with a jar of homemade passionfruit curd. Some have been roasted, and the rest await their individual futures.
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Just some of the pumpkins waiting for use
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Well I needed to add an update here, I'm thrilled to say that when we gave neighbours one of our pumpkins,
they've given us some mandarins and a very large gourd in return. Hubby has turned the mandarins into the
most divine jam, (he experimented with our very sour and almost inedible tangerines a week ago, and now perfected it to a whole new level with the mandarins instead) and he's made enough that tomorrow we'll drop the neighbours a jar as a thankyou for letting us access their tree. As for the gourd, I have no idea what to do with it???? So I'm open to suggestions, but for sure I'll keep some of the seeds out of it as it is spectacular to look at if nothing else.
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Simply divine Mandarin Jam |
