Pumpkin harvest weighs more than me!

our 2.9 kg King Kong standing
next to our friend's
slightly smaller baby

Today I weighed all the pumpkins we brought home the other day. I couldn't believe we managed to grow 56.7 kg of pumpkins this year! Produced by eight plants, oven a five-month growing period. For a first attempt at growing pumpkins, I couldn't be more proud of our achievements. It will give us lots of food this winter.

two of our eight
pumpkin seed sprouts

Shops are selling butternut cheaper now, as low as $2 per kg. That would be $113. But organic prices are higher, up to $4/kg. That's $226 worth of food we have produced, in just a quarter of our patch (20 square metres).

eight pumpkin plants take over
a quarter (20 sq. m.) of our patch

What made them grow so crazily was the good soil. Watering, weeding, and even pollinating … that's all important. But in the end, it's the soil, I believe, that made them so healthy and produce such heavy, large pumpkins. The largest one was King Kong, at 2.9kg, which we gave to our friend. I really think the names do work … names associated with large sizes has quite consistently resulted in large pumpkins!

I think it's amazing how the eight seeds we planted all sprouted, grew like mad, and produced so much food for us. It's magical. Much more magical than an iPad.

I'll be updating our Butternut Pumpkins 2012 list soon, with the precise weight of each pumpkin. I've typed it up on my computer, just haven't had the time to update that table.

I want to figure out a way of more regularly updating how much produce we're harvesting each week. Right now I have a table on my computer but I'll probably post this up online on an online spreadsheet. Yep, that's one of the most fun part of growing your own food: showing it off in terms of number! I'll get around to doing this some time during winter, when the harvesting slows down a bit.