Ghost Upon the Floor

Someday, I will grown a pumpkin. I've chronicled my past disappointments here, to varying degrees- my failure to be able to grow a pumpkin plant into a fully functioning and healthy being, capable of producing pumpkins. I don't believe I wrote about the extent of last year's failure-- nearly all of my many plants passing on to the next world before they even had a chance to flower.

 Needless to say, this year has been better. My Jack O'Lantern pumpkins I had so wanted to grow and carve did not survive. Several of the plants I bought at a local farmer's market-- pie pumpkins-- have been beacons of hope. They have flowered, and closed; flowered, and closed-- and I so hope they produce fruit.

 The record-setting drought we have had-- which I recently wrote about as it threatened the process of leaves changing in the fall-- I thought alone would have killed my pumpkins. But I have been giving the plants much water each day, and now am regularly spraying for bugs-- as I lost a plant early on to some evil creature which ate the plant whole, it seemed. Also, the location I planted these in, I know, are not ideal-- but they have nevertheless progressed farther than I have ever made it before.

 Here's to something of a crop, I hope, in time for fall.