Lesson Learned - Pumpkins Don't like Wet Soil

In THIS BLOG POST FROM AUGUST you were able to read about how we planted pumpkins and got to see some beautiful, healthy pumpkin plants with broad green leaves.  The plants were vining and putting out blooms.  I could even see some baby pumpkins.  And then the floodgates opened, figuratively speaking. The rains started and have not let up.  Let's go out and take a look at the pumpkin patch.

Wait just one cotton-picking minute!  Where are the pumpkins?  All I see is a weed patch.  Planting directions for pumpkins say that they must be planted in soil rich in compost and soil that is well drained and not soggy.  The soil in which I planted our pumpkins fit those specifications perfectly. So what happened?  Well, a month of rain almost every single day has the ability to turn the driest of soil into a mudfest.  Our beautiful pumpkin plants turned yellow and died.

As I kicked amongst the dead pumpkin vines, I came across a Jack-Be-Little pumpkin in the weeds that seemed to mock me.  This is our 2016 pumpkin crop! Sad.  Oh well, there's always next year.

But all is not lost.  In the same blog post I linked at the top of this post, I talked about also planting some cowpeas in the northern end of the pumpkin patch.  It was a mixture of some saved seed that included Blackeye peas, Ozark Razorback peas, Purple Hull peas, and Holstein peas.  While pumpkins get sick and die in wet soils, cowpeas can be a lot more forgiving.  Actually, they seem to be almost immune to all the rainfall.  They (along with some weeds, admittedly) have grown nicely.

The peas were tall and had many pods ripe for the picking.  I went inside and got a bucket and spent the next 15 minutes walking around the pea patch, poking around in the canopy and picking cowpeas. The fact that something in the garden was still thriving other than weeds was encouraging and lifted my spirits.

I picked a nice 'mess' of peas in varying stages of ripeness and brought them inside and washed them off.  Fresh picked peas always have all sorts of little critters on them, especially aphids, ants and stinkbugs.

I hollered at Benjamin who was in his bedroom.  Benjamin likes to shell peas.  We sat in the den and shelled peas while we watched a college football game.  That's one of my favorite things to do!  In no time we were done and had shelled an assortment of cowpeas of the varieties we discussed above and it measured out to be a little more than a quart.  In a few days, Tricia will put a pot of rice cooking and then she'll cook these peas with some sausage added to give a little smokey flavoring and we'll eat a fine meal of peas over rice.  That'll stick to your ribs.

Although the pumpkin patch was certainly disappointing, I'm happy with the peas and they'll continue to bear for a while now.  Also, I think if we root around in the deep freeze for a bit, we may find a ziploc bag or two of processed pumpkin from last year.  We may get that pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving yet!