When Halloween finished up in October, I took the advice in this Pinterest post about growing pumpkins from your old jack-o-lanterns.
Source: growinginprek.com via Douglas on Pinterest
The Christmas deer below stands on top of what was, only a few weeks ago, a large pine tree. It, and another on the property, were infected with beetle so we had them removed for both decorative and safety reasons. The tree company took down the tree and also ground out the stump. This left a large “hump” of wood chips in this area. I saw this as an opportunity to try out this pumpkin idea on a larger scale.
I dug a sizable hole in the pile of wood chip and filled it halfway or so with compost from our bins. I then threw in our pumpkin, which as already quite soft and gooey. It broke open a little, but I chopped it up with the shovel and then put some more compost over the top. A bit of the wood chip was added as a mulch and I was done. The whole process only took about 10 minutes and figured it was worth a try.
Sure enough, last week, my wife came in from doing some watering to inform me that the pumpkins were coming up in that area .You can just barely see the green leaves at the front foot of the Christmas deer in the picture below.
Here is a closer picture of the leaves.
I have no idea if these plants will actually produce pumpkins, but we will water them and give them a little TLC and see what happens in the coming months.