The Great Pumpkin Arrives Early

My Mother's Day gift to you, my friends, is this word of advice:
Never compost a pumpkin!!!

A "modest" volunteer pumpkin plant

My Mother's Day present two years ago, right before we moved into this house, was a compost bin. This Spring was the first time we used any of the compost as it needed about 18 months to really develop good dirt. However, during that 18 months our small boy was obsessed with pumpkins more than once. The chant of "More, more, MORE pumpkins" was very popular. Turns out that putting lots of pumpkins and pumpkin innards from pies into a compost pile gets you dozens of little volunteer pumpkin plants sprouting in your garden. Ooops.

Choking out the peppers

Since we were out of town for a week during which the weather was warm and perfect for growing, the modest vines we had been ignoring since we were busy turned into giant robust vines that required big garden clippers to cut. They were HUGE, choking out the peppers and okra and nearly pulling over two tomato plants.

A couple of other observations:  if you eat a lot of avocados (clearly we do) the shells don't compost well. Nor do peach pits. Remember the 27 lbs of peaches I processed last spring? Yeah. We found their remnants. But the dirt was fabulously black and rich. We had a great, relaxing Mother's Day that started and ended in the garden just like we like it.