Oh My Gourd Part 2

Time for a little update! About two weeks ago I filled you all in on our surprise compost pile plant life. (Click here to refresh your memory.)

Within a short period of time our compost pile had gone from looking like this:

To looking like this:

Recently, we noticed this bad boy had sprouted out from one of the vines.

We've been uncertain about what this bulging plant really is but just a few days ago we got our answer. The fruit of our plant has gotten much bigger in size and it has also begun to turn orange. We've got ourselves a pumpkin!

It turns out that the pumpkin seeds from last year's Halloween carvings are doing well in the compost pile. Not only has the pumpkin grown tremendously, but so has the plant that it has sprouted from. If you scroll up to the top of this post you can see what the plant looked like about a week and a half ago. Today the plant looks like this:

The walls of the compost pile have disappeared under a jungle of leaves. As much as we love to see that the pumpkin plant is thriving (especially in this summer heat) we will be pruning it back just a little so that it doesn't spill too far outside of the compost pile walls. Along with all the new leaves, we've spotted a lot of new flowers as well. Hopefully this will mean that we'll have a few more pumpkins growing as well.

For now we at least have one new pumpkin! Zac and I found this little guy growing on the ground just outside of the compost pile. We took this photo a few days ago when the new little pumpkin was the size of a baseball. Today the pumpkin is about the size of a child's small bouncy ball.

It's amazing how quickly they grow! Unfortunately, we don't think that these pumpkins will make it another three and a half months to become our carved jack 'o lanterns come Halloween. We hope that several more pumpkins will sprout up in time for the holiday celebration. It would be such a cool thing to be able to pick out our own pumpkin every year for Haloween. I'm sure that the future kiddos will have fun picking out their own pumpkins, watching them grow, carving them, and then putting them on display for all the other trick or treaters in the neighborhood.

In the meantime, Zac and I are excitedly awaiting the arrival of new pumpkins.....stay tuned!