The Great Pumpkin Massacre of 2017

First off, ignore the illustration above for just a second, and focus on those big beautiful green leaves below... :)

Everything starting popping up! We were pumped!!! 

This was W-O-R-K-I-N-G!!!! 

Brent had me run back over to the Extension Office on Cypress to talk to Kerry Heafner again.

This man is nice. He has to get amused at all my questions :) and told me we were in "unchartered territory" trying to grow pumpkins around here. He said the best thing to grow in our parts was berries!!! Hence all the berry farms around to go pick at. Smart people
 He warned us about nocturnal cut worms(!!!) and "Damping Off"  and to expect a powdery mildew to get on our leaves in the summer. Uggggg.

How do real Farmers handle this every day??

 And all the rain we have been getting?!?! 

This. Is. Stressful.....

  And now it was time to start playing God.... 

Seriously, this bugged me a bunch. I hate purposely killing something.  I'm the girl who picks up the worms after a rain when they are stuck on the concrete and puts them back in the grass.
  But, it was time to start thinning out the plants if we wanted to maximize our pumpkins potential growth.
  In each spot, we had put down 3-4 seeds. Now, almost all of those seeds were growing and it was time to thin them out. Kerry said to just "pull them up and thin out the weakest". How do you decide who is weak and who is strong??

I just pulled up the smallest ones of the bunch. Sorry little guys!!!

All the casualties were in a pile. 

It was the Great Pumpkin Massacre over on Harvest Oaks.

   Kerry said that trying to transplant the ones we pulled up was pretty much a lost cause. Pumpkins didn't do well with transplanting. So... here we were going along to each plant cluster and deciding who would live and who would be making an early departure to pumpkin heaven.

P was in charge of collecting all the ones we pulled up and putting them in a pile. 

  We decided to make the ultimate judgment on these plants right before we went out of town.

 I felt awful. Get it done and then leave for a week.  I couldn't bare to face them after we killed off so many of their family members. Our hopes were that when we came back in town, the ones remaining would of forgiven us and (hopefully) be bigger and stronger.

Brent brought down the other Mummy from the attic to keep guard over the Patch. This now made two of them!!!! 

So here is what it all looked like when we left...

And in one week, this is how much it all grew...

A-MAZE BALLS!!!!!

And a close up....

I don't want to jinx us, but I'm pretty pumped about all this growth.  I'm feeling like we are real farmers!!!!

We must be doomed.....

To be continued.