Pumpkins and Lost

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Sooo Dan and I decided to jump on the Lost bandwagon a little late…..okay a lot late, but that’s good because now its on Netflix and I don’t have to wait for commercials or suffer through a few months after a season finale before seeing what happened next.  Wow are we addicted, why didn’t anyone tell us this show rocked lol.  We wanted to watch it when it came out years ago but back then DVRs were new to us and we didn’t have one and we missed the first 2 episodes and didn’t bother trying to catch the 3^rd figuring we would be ummmm lost? (no pun intended lol).

Anyways Lost is crack, I get twitchy after not watching it for a few days and need to get my fix but with our schedules its not easy to squeeze in an hour long show during the week but when the weekend rolls around we get our slurpees and settle down on the sofa for a marathon (after Dean goes to bed of course).  A few weekends we even resorted to downing coffee milkshakes to stay awake through a few more episodes.  Obsessed? A little lol.  We are halfway through and I already am not looking forward to the end :(

My other latest obsession is my pumpkins.  I planted pumpkins back in May, I ordered the giant seeds that advertised 800 pound pumpkins, I figured if they are supposed to be that big then even if I screw them up I should get some 20 pounders right? Makes sense to me lol.  So B and I went out and planted the seeds and to our surprise a few days later we had sprouts!  I got excited that maybe we actually might get some pumpkins.  Then they got bigger and bigger and even got flowers!!  This is going to work, I thought!  Well I figured, I planted them in the dirt, I water them and they have sun that’s all they need right? Just sit back and wait for my big round pumpkins to start growing in.  WRONG!!! Oh so wrong.  The back of the little seed packet that says plant, water and enjoy clearly left off a lot.  I read nothing about special fertilizer, powdery mildew, moles, bugs upon bugs upon bugs whose goals in life are to destroy my tiny pumpkin patch.

Now I hate bugs, all bugs, big ones, little ones, flying ones, crawling ones, all of them.  So the day mom and I went to water the pumpkins and look at the cute little fuzzy baby pumpkins and we saw stinkbugs all over the plants I freaked and ran for Google only to find these “stink bugs” were actually squash bugs, bugs who eat squash.  I read that they lay tiny little eggs all over the back of leaves and armed with pink polka dotted gloves mom turned the leaves over revealing my nightmare…tons of squash bug eggs!  We had a system, I would water the pumpkins and flush the bugs out while she waited and killed the ones that crawled to the top of the leaves, then she would pick off all the eggs while I watched (from a distance) slapping invisible bugs off my legs that I swear were on me.  After a couple days of this I noticed a really pretty bug on one of the leaves, a little beetle that was lime green and black striped, he was actually cute?? Wrong again, that “cute” little bug was a cucumber beetle whose appetite was also set on my tiny baby pumpkins.  Commence more bug picking! (well for me commence more watching other people kill bugs lol).

Upon my many late nights of Googling these garden pests I would often read about a squash vine borer, a red and black moth whose larvae (that word just makes me puke) live inside the vines of pumpkins slowly killing them.

Guess what my garden has now?!

Oh yes we have vine borers -_-

I finally searched around and found this powder that promised to kill them all and it has been doing a pretty good job but the lonely squash bug perched on a leaf yesterday tells me its time to reapply.

These pumpkins have surely been a bigger project than any of us could have imagined, with all the bugs and the tons of disappointing shriveled up little pumpkins that died of heat stroke and not to mention the hand pollinating mom does (pumpkins have boy and girl flowers that need to uhhh need to “mate” so to speak to make baby pumpkins.)

Despite all this we have 3 good pumpkins growing and a lot of promising new baby pumpkins.

So what in the world do pumpkins and Lost have in common?  Well the other day I was washing dishes thinking of the little pumpkin that was growing very well and how we for some reason refer to it as a “he” so I thought maybe we should name it, that would be cute lol.  But really how do you name a pumpkin?

The first name that popped into my head was Jack, you know like Jack-o-lantern

Oh so cliché lol.

And then I thought NO! Jack as in Jack Shephard from Lost and the new one growing would be Kate, and I would name them all after Lost characters, Sawyer, Locke, Charlie, even a Mr. Echo, the whole 9 yards, how awesome would that be (okay, okay its cheesy but do you have a better idea lol).

And so we now have a Jack and Kate and possibly a Sawyer growing in our garden but instead of battling smoke monsters, the Others and polar bears, they are battling squash bugs, cucumber beetles and vine borers.  

Heres to their survival.  Go Team Pumpkin!!!