Buried Treasure

There's a line of happy, sweet little pumpkins perched on my deck.  Noah decided it was time to harvest from the backyard yesterday.  As I've mentioned before, our pumpkin patch was quite the surprise this summer.

I went a little overboard last year buying pumpkins, even filling my flower boxes with them.  At the end of the season, Tim tossed a few under the deck just to see what happened.  Sometime this summer we noticed vines snaking their way out from under the deck, soon to be covered in flowering blooms.  A few weeks later tiny pumpkins began to sprout.

Noah has had such fun this summer watching their progress.  He would visit the backyard every other day or so to see if they were bigger.  He'd peek and count and water them, so excited for the day we could pick them.  For whatever reason, when he arrived home from school on Friday, he went straight to the backyard.  Moments later, yelling happily, he urged me to come onto the deck.

He began filling the steps with pumpkins of all shapes and sizes, quickly returning to the yard to see if another could be found.  In all he gathered well over a dozen.  And he's named each of them!

When I pick pumpkins I like to find the ones with personality.  I like the ones that are different.  I'm so tickled that our little private patch could provide us with such an variety.  We have medium, normal pumpkins...lumpy, angry pumpkins....cute,  tiny pumpkins...and on and on.  Such a fun an unexpected find as Noah dug for buried treasure right from our own yard.

And the fun isn't over.  We still get to paint and carve and decorate with them.  Oh, and of course recycle those seeds for a new crop next year!