Unexpected Vegetable Garden Additions

I had to go to the feed store to get a few seeds and get the propane tank filled for the barbecue. What I didn’t expect to find was seeds for a pumpkin straight out of a fairytale.

Last week when I planted my Jack O’Lanterns and zucchini and green beans, I didn’t realize that I had used up all my seeds for sugar pumpkins used for making pie. This made me sad. Please try to imagine a lone tear dripping down my cheek from my hazel green eye as you visualize this. (This is an inside joke, and that’s as far as I’m taking it.) Anyway, so while at the feed store searching for the sugar pumpkin seeds I had gotten there in the past, I came across another packet of pumpkin seeds for an heirloom variety called Fairytale.

At first I thought they were the miniature pumpkins and already made up my mind to purchase them, but upon reading the back I found that this variety grew to thirty pounds and 18 inches wide! And they’re baking pumpkins, not just for carving! Bonus! However, I still wanted my sugar pumpkins because they are small and make excellent pumpkin pie, so my quest continued… until I came across an heirloom variety of bush beans that had purple pods. Obviously I had to get those too, right? And then there were sunflowers, the mammoth ten footers. Who doesn’t need those in their garden?

Eventually I found the sugar pumpkins, had them refill my propane thank and when I got home began plotting where things were going to go. I had already planted pole beans (green) and Jack O’Lanterns in a large empty space between the cherry tree and lilac, and the zucchini along the fence behind the vegetable garden. Decisions, decisions. I knew the sunflowers were going to go right along the fence between the cherry and lilac, and spaced them appropriately. I decided to put the Fairytales in with the Jack O’Lanterns and planted them in three mounds in the front of the plot, but still had a few leftover seeds and figured, heck, why not plant another mound behind the vegetable garden, so I did. I also put the purple bush beans in a row in front of the zucchini and the sugar pumpkins in front of them.

I can’t wait until summer when these two areas are filled with various pumpkins, squash and beans, and hope I didn’t go overboard. Then again, if we do end up with a back fence full of pumpkins, I could always invite friends and family to our little pumpkin patch to pick out a few for Halloween… or horde them all to ourselves because I’m selfish like that! Of course, I did that last year with the sugar pumpkins and half of them went bad from not being used, so maybe it would be better to allow other people to have a few.