You can't carve zucchini into Jack-O-lanterns

Remember earlier this summer when we planted our garden?

We weeded, we tilled the ground, we planted various kinds of seeds.........

One of my kids planted an entire row of zucchini?

I mocked said child, and teased them mercilessly about the number of zucchini that we would be blessed with, and the number of creative ways that I would be cooking said zucchini, and how sick we would be of eating zucchini and that we would probably be finding a myriad of other non food uses for all of that zucchini that would be overtaking not only the garden area but our entire back yard.........


Well guess what?


None of the zucchini plants grew.



Zero.





Zip.





Nada.



Before you start thinking that maybe one or more of the children had something to do with this, I will add that none of the seeds that we planted in this area of the garden actually grew.

The entire middle section of the garden was completely bare.

I thought that maybe there had been something wrong with the seeds, so I went out and bought some healthy pepper plants and planted them in that area, however, within a day or two, they were completely dead.

The weeds, however, seem to be thriving.

I felt really bad about this, we planted a gazillion seeds in hopes that we might get a few plants. In that plot, we planted zucchini, yellow squash, cucumbers, bell peppers, and jalapeno peppers, and none of them grew. I was beginning to feel like a gardening failure.

Fortunately, on either side of this barren patch of land (barren except for the stupid weeds which seem to be growing quite well, thank you) we did have some gardening success.

The cute little pea plants were growing!


Or at least they were until I sent one of the offspring out to weed the garden, then the pea plants just disappeared.

This kid felt really bad when they realized what they had done.



Wait, come to think of it, this particular child has never liked peas.



?????

There were also two cute little lettuce plants that sprouted up, or at least we thought that they were lettuce until they started getting really tall and began to resemble weeds.

On the other side of the garden, the pumpkin plants were beginning to grow. 5 cute little pumpkin plants had sprouted and seemed to be doing OK.

Fast forward to today, we now have 5 very large pumpkin plants, (one vine is over 15 feet long!) and so far it looks like we'll have a several pumpkins!

We were hoping to grow enough so that the kids could each carve one for Halloween, and so far it looks like they'll each get at least one.

I'm hoping that next year we might be able to grow something that we can actually eat.