Last year, a patron picked up some seeds from this huge pumpkin, and planted them over the winter. They started to grow in the summer, and she thought she had too many for the space that she had, so she brought them to my colleague and I, one for each of us, in, in a pot. Or in a bucket kind of thing. And I don’t really have — I, I didn’t have a good space here, and I knew that I would kill it if I left it here, so I took it to my parents’ house and gave it to my mom. And she has, some years, had success in growing pumpkins or gourds out in this brush pile that they have in the backyard. Well, past the backyard. Like, beyond the backyard.
So I gave it to her, but before I gave it to her — so my, the patron left it outside of the library, right by the door, thinking that that was — I thought, too — that it was a good spot where I’d see it when I left. Well, I totally did not see it. So it got left there overnight, and the sprinklers came on that night, and completely filled it with water. Like, literally saturated the entire bucket.
And it was, you know, basically overflowing, like, to the top with water when I found it the next morning. And I thought “Oh, great.” It was probably, at that point, like six inches tall, maybe. Maybe eight inches tall. So there, there was a plant growing out of it, at that point. So, there was again, six or eight inches above where the water was that was still above the seed level there, but I thought, “Oh, I’ve done it now.” Like, “I’ve already killed it. I didn’t even, I didn’t even give it a chance, and I already killed it.”
Well, I dumped the water. Like, just kept dumping, dumping, dumping, and t- — you know, kept the soil in, but dumped the water out. And took it to my mom. And she planted it, and it grew. Like, it grew. The plant itself grew really well. Lots and lots of vines, lots and lots of flowers. She ended up getting two pumpkins that actually turned into pumpkins.
One of them was eaten when it was very small, and the other one, that was a little bit bigger when the other one was eaten, got nibbled on, but then my mom — like, this happened, like, overnight. Like, she’d been going out every day. One day, the two pumpkins are fine. The next day, she went out and the one was totally eaten and there was bite — you know, bites out of the other one.
So she looked something up online about how to prevent, you know, something from eating a — what you could spray on it or what you could put on it. So she had this mixture of something. I can’t even remember. Vine- — could it have been vinegar? I don’t know. Like, some ho- — just household ingredients. Like, it wasn’t any, like, pesticide or anything. It was just, like, hous- — cayenne pepper, maybe? Just some things that wouldn’t kill the plant, wouldn’t, you know wouldn’t harm, you know, anything around there, but that would just deter any animal that was trying to get it. So she, so she did that.