The knee stains on our overalls is proof that plenty of time is spent in our garden on the franch. Over the last few years, we’ve been blessed with decent harvests of, in alphabetical order, asparagus, beans, beets, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, cucumbers, kale, lettuce, onions, peas, peppers, potatoes, spinach, squash, and tomatoes. And a single blackberry. Sadly though, our thumbs remain only a light shade of green. Why? It’s because of pumpkins. Do you know pumpkins take a long time to grow? Every year, for some reason, we are late in the planting of our pumpkins. We don’t seem to know how to count backwards. Come October, we don’t have any pumpkins to carve. It’s embarrassing to have to take our children to the pumpkin patch down the road year after year. This year, it was looking like our pumpkins would actually ripen in time to make a homemade pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. Our thumbs seemed a darker shade of green. Then, an early deep freeze for South Texas last week killed our pumpkin vines! Coincidentally, our family recently read in the The Little House on the Prairie series that Laura’s family actually made a pumpkin pie with green pumpkins when an early October frost killed their pumpkin vines. I’m inspired, for a minute. But, never mind, I am no Ma Ingalls. So, will you please remind us next year (call, text, tweet, post or yell) to plant in early August. Or is that still too late?
This makes me wonder how farmers cope when one early frost kills a whole seasons work. While I complain when I have to scrape the frost of my car windows.
I am quite impressed with the farmer you have become!!