Peeking Into Next Door's Garden

We love fresh tomatoes in the summer, so I usually plant a few tomato plants in my back garden. This year I prepared the soil by digging deeply and mulching it with the contents of my compost bin. I'm not very good at making compost and most of it hadn't broken down, but I used it anyway and planted my little tomatoes, and put giant cages around them. (Actually it's 6"x6" welded wire mesh that they use to reinforce concrete slabs.) I had high hopes. And my tomatoes have grown quite well. Here they are overflowing the 5' high cages. And they have given us lots of tomatoes so I'm happy about that.But that compost gave us some surprises. A couple of weeks after I planted the tomatoes all kinds of things started sprouting in the compost. Most of them I recognized: tomatoes, weeds, various things from the squash family and even an avocado! (This is because, of course, we put kitchen scraps in the compost bin.) So I pulled all the tiny tomatoes seedlings and all the weeds and most of the mystery/squash things. But I left two of them that were in acceptable locations just to see what they were. And as the summer progressed I guessed that one of them might be a pumpkin. (I bought two beautiful dusty orange pumpkins last year from an honor farm stand and I remember LOM putting them in the compost after Thanksgiving.)

So here is the stem of that pumpkin beneath the tomatoes. It clambered up the fence....

and one branch went over the top...

and one stayed on my side, but alas it has NO fruit!

But on Next Door's side....

she has a beautiful dusty orange Cinderella type pumpkin happily growing on a little table. Is this FAIR? Did I not {sort of} plant it? Am I not watering it? Shouldn't it be on my side?

You can bet next year. if I get anything resembling a pumpkin I'm going to keep all the branches on my side. Hmmmph!

This is what WE got from the seedlings: Acorn squash. Double Hmmmph! I mean Acorn squash are ok, but we can buy them cheaply at the store whilst those pumpkins cost me $5.00 each!

Sometimes life's not fair.

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And in other news: My baby is coming home from England tomorrow! Yippee! She has been gone 3 whole months. I talked to her yesterday on the phone and she's had all kinds of fun, but I think she's happy to be coming home. I'm thinking I'm happy she's coming home too.