The Great Bumpkin

I haven't carved a pumpkin in several years.  I always have great intentions and then seem to run out of time or motivation or something.  This year, as I was picking out some decorative pumpkins at the local farm market, the bumpy one just called to me to become a Cotswold sheep.  So I did.

I wish I'd left some details in her ears.  That was the original sketch, but I got carried away carving and forgot.  I toyed with adding them in the next day, but she doesn't know I messed that up and I'm not going to tell her.  She's just fine,  just as she is :-).

A practice run in the dark feed room.  I love that there is just enough light to show her bumps well.

Her spot on the Wool House porch.

And lit up for the night.  The sprinkling of rain was annoying for most of the festivities, but made a nice addition to this picture.

This is a special shout out to The Great Pumpkin and his younger brother.  The orange and yellow pumpkin showed up around mid summer as a volunteer across the road from our mailbox.  The green speckled one was a late arrival just a month or so ago.  There had been a middle pumpkin as well, but he was lost in a road incident :'-(.

I carried water out to this hard working pumpkin plant through the entire drought.  And for some reason the squash bugs either never found it or maybe somehow she was more resistant than all my other plants have been the last couple of years.  I will save their seeds and see what we get next year.

I just love pumpkins :-).

The Woodworking Olympics

Here's the plan.  

Decide to get a rabbit.  

Do a bunch of research on how to house and care for said rabbit.  

Build a temporary house for the rabbit on top of the drying tables in the Wool House because you assume it will take a couple of weeks to get comfortable with each other and it might go quicker if you are on eye level.

Adopt a super sweet bunny from the Lexington Humane Society and realize it won't take much time at all for everyone to settle in, but that's okay, it's fun to have him up high every time you walk in the door.

For exercise and socialization, you install a fence around the lower half of the Wool House porch so the super sweet bunny can go out in the mornings while it's cool and run around while you do a little work and drink coffee.

The sides with the wide railing are fairly cat proof, but the front is completely calling "Hey, kitty kitty" and while Possum won't try to breach it while I'm sitting there, Archie is pretty much "Here, hold my beer."

The bigger issue is what happens if you need to pee.  Figuring it would be easier to screen the porch in than build a bathroom on it we decide to build the screens.  We maybe should have rethought the plumbing idea. 

Mixed in with all the porch work was a water leak in and then under the sink in the washroom which was an olympics all it's own, but no one really wants to think about plumbing problems, even if it's on someone else's blog.

Insert (only a small amount of) blood, (lots and lots of) sweat, (only thoughts of crying, surprisingly) tears and (a few) bruises...

Well, the chickens might have done some crying.  Added benefit of screening in the porch is the lack of chicken traffic up there.  We should have screened it in years ago.

That far end is higher up than you'd guess :-o.

This is a work in progress picture before the door frame was finished, but I love Pinot hopping around enjoying his safety porch :-).  The newly added roll down blinds made a huge difference in temperature on the porch and I have no idea why I never thought to add them before.  Slow learner...

Once the porch was finished we moved onto Pinot's permanent house.  I thought I could do most of this by myself and I probably could have, but it quickly became apparent it would be much easier if I had help.  Poor Saint Tim...

The move from the fun upper level to the almost as fun middle shelf is so Pinot can come out and run around the wash room if he wants. I also was using the middle shelf mostly for storage, but used the top shelf for almost everything including, but not limited to, drying wool.

I did build Pinot's ramp by myself.  Not a hard job, but I'm sharing it because I salvaged a scrap of carpet from the garage to give him traction.  Not just any carpet, but old wool carpet from our house.  It had been living in the garage under mowers and weedeaters and muddy feet and...chicken parties.

I scrubbed it with Dawn and some carpet cleaner and while it's not spotless, it did clean up better than a piece of synthetic carpet would have, especially as many years old as it is.  I loved having that wool carpet in the house years ago and I'm happy to see it still working hard in the Wool House now.

While the tools were still out I finally built a better sun filter for the night blooming cereus.  I have the best luck getting it to bloom by putting it in the bright sun, but it always sunburns so badly that I feel awful for it.  I decided to try a filtering the sun this year and some of the contraptions I'd set up were pretty hillbilly.  This is much better.  I hope it helps.

And thus extinguishes the flame for the Woodworking Olympics...I hope.

My New Pet Potato

I say that like there was an old pet potato.  There wasn't.  In fact, I didn't even know you could have a pet potato, but here we are.

A week or so ago I used up the last of a bag of organic Yukon Gold potatoes and found a teeny tiny potato left in the bottom.  It was the size of a small olive, a sort of flat-ish olive.  Somehow it had rolled through the sorter and landed in my bag of potatoes.

It was way too small to think about cooking, but it had a tiny sprout starting on it so I decided to stick it in a pot and give it a chance to grow and reach it's full potential and for the next couple of days I carried it outside during the day and back inside for the freezing nights.

And I named it Dug.

Since everyone is already making fun of me, would anyone else like to join in and follow Dug's summer of adventures?

Don't Quit Your Day Job

Last year I grew a completely accidental pumpkin patch and it was the most fun thing I've ever grown.  I had the best time watching the plants overtake a pretty big section of the side field and the pumpkins were all different sizes and colors and the sheep had two big pumpkin parties at the end of the season and I decided I was going to be a pumpkin farmer.  Pumpkins at Punkin's Patch!

This spring I picked out three different varieties of seeds (including one called Big Moose!), figured out my plant date for fall pumpkins and then found out the extension office was going to do a "Who can grow the biggest pumpkin in Harrison County" contest and I was All In.

I waited with great anticipation for the date I could go pick up my free pumpkin seeds and in the meantime strategized as only I can over-think things and gathered up special dirt and compost and researched and watched YouTube videos and created a baby pumpkin nursery and went ahead and planted my earlier chosen seeds out in a special safe zone in the yard, fenced off and everything.

Since all the volunteer pumpkins last year grew so well just laying out on top of the pasture, I thought if I made a little effort to amend the soil for each seed this year they'd really take off.  And I thought the Big Moose pumpkins could just live in the fenced area with the other pumpkins. I mean, how big could they get?

When I got the educational handouts from the extension office I found out that the Big Moose pumpkin getting labeled as a "giant" meant it was going to be...a giant.  Who knew.  I carefully dug as many of  those seeds as I could find back up and put them in starter pots along with the extension office seeds.  The rest of the seeds sprouted, but have not taken off in any sort of manner.  Pumpkin farming, not as easy as I'd hoped.

Four of the five extension office seeds sprouted and four of the five Big Moose seeds I found sprouted as well.  As the babies grew I made their fancy growing mounds, which involved lots of shoveling and moving of heavy materials on some really hot and humid days.  I was becoming less enamored with pumpkin farming by the day...but the baby pumpkins all grew well and looked good.

When the plants got big enough to transplant, I moved them into their respective mounds.  Four Big Moose plants and three of the extension office plants (I'll try to remember to come back in and update the variety) were planted in Del Boca Vista.  I put the biggest and strongest extension office plant out front, next to the driveway so I could really keep an eye on it, in preparation for the October 27th weigh in at the office.

I lost one of the Big Moose pumpkins in a wind accident fairly early on.  I moved a tiny volunteer from just outside the Wool House into it's open spot and babied it through some hot weather and it survived and is now doing a great job trying to catch up.

I'm concerned about these leaves turning yellow.  This is my biggest Big Moose plant...of course.  It's also the first one to produce any female flowers and now has two pumpkins growing along it's reaching vines.  I haven't decided if I'm going to limit it to only two in hopes of growing a true giant.  At this point I'm probably just going to be happy if I get any pumpkins.

This Big Moose plant did not look good yesterday and has not rebounded today so I'm afraid it's going to be a another casualty.  I've been carefully watching the plants for bugs and mildew and all sorts of other problems.  I've used diatomaceous earth and a couple of careful applications of organic Neem Oil in the evenings when the bees are long gone, but I don't have any control over the too wet conditions that may be causing some of my issues.  

Three of the extension office plants.

While my volunteers last year were big, hardy, heavy producers, the volunteers this year (probably a different variety) have been a bust except for a couple plants here and there.  This nice volunteer is growing out in the barn lot, so I have zero expectations for a pumpkin to reach maturity surrounded by sheep, but it's helping provide pollination for the female flowers in the main patch.

The bees, hard at work.

Oh, here's a funny story.  The first morning I knew I had a female flower ready to open it was drizzling rain.  The flowers are only open for a short time on one morning so there's just a small window where they can get pollinated.  I didn't think the bees would be out until the rain stopped, so I read up on how to manually pollinate it, grabbed my paint brush, picked up some pollen from a male flower and when I went to dust it into the female, two bees popped up and scolded me.  

"Do you mind?!?"

I shouldn't have doubted them :-).

I think this epistle basically catches everything up on the 2023 great pumpkin venture.  I have lost any expectation that it will be a Great Pumpkin venture, but I hope I'm wrong and will have some happy updates through the next couple of months.  

I'm glad I'm just trying to find something fun to do during my least favorite time of the year and not trying to feed my family.  Farming is not for the faint of heart and we all need to be cognizant of that fact and remember that food does not miraculously appear at the grocery store.

It would be nice to be able to feed at least a couple of pumpkins to my sheep family.

It is really hard to type pumpkin instead of Punkin.