This project is very dear to my heart, so I hope you'll forgive the length of this post!
In early May, S. and I were at a local nursery picking up some hanging flowers for my mom for Mother's Day. I always get a little excited around plants; I love greenery and lush growth and have regular fantasies of working in my own garden, making dinner with vegetables I grew myself, and just being all-around horticulturally-capable.
Except that my past is rather checkered when it comes to plant life. As a child, my mom made several attempts to get me to respect and appreciate plants by giving me my very own to care for. It started with a pack of marigold seeds that I planted behind our house in Michigan. They sprouted, grew, blossomed-- and then our dog dug them up.
After we moved to California, I had an interest in the new, unusual-looking desert plants that are so common out here, specifically cacti. So one day I picked one out at a nursery and we brought it home. I named it Junior because it was so tiny, and I put him in the windowsill of my room and watched him slowly expand in size.
Junior-- a cactus, remember-- acquired a severe sunburn and died.
Thus it was with well-earned trepidation that I had long ago decided to stay away from plants requiring more than the occasional dusting. Except that last year, we bought a house with a yard. A blank canvas. And I had already slipped up and let myself buy three queen palms and a hibiscus plant.
Our palms, while still alive a year later, do not appear to have grown an inch.
So when we made the trek to the nursery, I frolicked among the rows upon rows of little seedlings, lush ground covers, and potted trees, and visions of sugar snap peas and strawberries danced in my head.
I thank my stars every day that S. puts up with me, because by the time we'd picked out my mom's hanging plants, I had a plan. A plan that was only exacerbated by the large number of seed packets covering an entire wall in the nursery's office. Including pumpkin seeds.
One of the big troubles I'd been having with planning our wedding up until that point was that I'd been doing all my planning in the spring. Which meant that all of my inspiration was for a spring wedding. When my eyes lit on that little tiny seed packet full of pumpkin potential, a light bulb went off. Of course! A fall wedding has to have pumpkins! Why not grow them myself?
Looking back now, this was absolutely insane to try.
But we picked up some seeds and some compost along with my mom's plants, and went on our way. (I also couldn't resist buying eighteen strawberry plant seedlings). I did some calculations and as far as I could tell, we needed to get these babies in the ground in order to have pumpkins in time for the wedding! So that weekend, we tore up a corner of our yard, and mulched, and composted, and planted, and watered. And waited.
It took a couple weeks of daily watering-but-not-overwatering, and holding my breath, but then magic started to happen:
The first two rows are white pumpkin vines, the back two are fairytale pumpkin vines, and waaaay in the back you can see my two rows of strawberry plants.
Flowers grew, then bloomed and closed all in one day. I spent many an early morning with a bamboo skewer, going from flower to flower trying to pollinate them all. Yeah.
Then the bases of the flowers bulged out and baby pumpkins started to form! The flowers wilted and shrunk, and the ball settled down on the vine until it touched the ground. At this point, I put pine shavings (the kind that I use for my horse) under each one to minimize the amount of scratches and dirt they would suffer while they grew.
A couple weeks ago, my oldest vines started dying, even though my pumpkins aren't fully mature yet. But they're big enough, and orange enough, that I will still use them for my wedding. Now to just find someplace cool and dry to store them until October!
This hasn't been a total success. As I said, mine are still sort of small, and this is what a fairytale pumpkin is supposed to look like:
These are the three biggest fairytale pumpkins I have:
The middle one is still growing, so it might get the signature color the other two are missing.
And this is my largest white pumpkin:
All told, I hope to have at least 8-10 pumpkins for our wedding that I've grown myself. I've already decided I'm not going to cry if it doesn't work out, because at least I tried. And the fact that I've come this far has been not only amazingly rewarding, but really fun, too!
Are you home-growing anything for your wedding?
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