Pumpkin Slayer

My cardio is lawn care.  Instead of sweating to the oldies though, I sweat to a mix of Muse, NSYNC, Kelly Clarkson, and the Foo Fighters.  (It's awesome.)  With all this rain we've been having I can't seem to get out there to cut the forest that has become my back yard, but worst than the look of it, Sophie won't go to the bathroom in it.  The grass is either too tall or too wet for her liking and she spends most of her time hopping around like a bunny trying to find the perfect spot, which she never finds.  So she just runs back to the door trying to convince me that her peeing in the house is a good thing.  Other than the tall weeds, something else is taking over the back yard... 

'Thems there is a pumpkin, Jim Bob!'

I swear, if I can't turn at least one of these bitches into a stage couch, I'm going to be pissed.  The vines have been growing for awhile but the pumpkins emerging is totally new.  Like just in the past couple of days.  The fast growth process gives me hope on the being magical theory.  I've read where you have to turn the pumpkins to avoid getting flat sides or rotting but have you ever tried doing it???  First of all the vines have ANCHORED themselves into the ground and the vines are prickly.  PRICKLY!  It's like they want to be squishy and gross.  I also read where you can put sand underneath them to keep them rounded but with all the rain we've been having, I have a feeling all that sand would end up in my crawl space and instead of happy pumpkins I would have created a nightmare beach scene.  Reading about them also armed me with knowledge I never wanted to know...Like, did you know the flowers that produce the pumpkins are females and the pumpkins come from the bulb growing on the bottom of the flower because it's the...uterus??  Yeah.  I totally had a Juno moment where I could hear her voice in my head echoing, 'Did you know babies have fingernails??  FINGERNAILS!'  File this under crap I wish I had never googled.

Yesterday there was finally a lull in the rain, fueled with determination and a little fear (I had just watched The Conjuring) I grabbed the weed eater and lawn mower and got to work on Sophie's bathroom palace  the back yard.  For an hour and a half I worked to fight the sun going down and the rain.  And then I decided to attack the pumpkin patch.  Armed with hand clippers and gardening gloves I cut vine by vine, being careful not to cut vines that already had pumpkins on them to avoid pumpkincide.  I may have been shouting, 'There can be only one!!'.

When I was done I had a good 6 feet of vine cut off and the patch looked...

Exactly the same.

 

 



*sigh*  Oh well.  At least they aren't growing over the grave of a witch ghost that has sworn to murder anyone living in my house...probably.