I am married to a miracle grower. Josh has a green thumb, and is so good at growing plants! He's the reason why our grass is green and our bushes are perfectly shaped, and why our garden and pumpkin patch are so bounteous. He amazes me with his ability to make things grow...because I am so bad at it!
This is the third year that we've grown a pumpkin patch. This year, we started working in it in May. Josh rototilled the area:
And the boys picked rocks out of the soil:
And then we planted our pumpkin seeds, and the vegetable garden around the perimeter of the pumpkin patch:
This spring, Josh built new sprinkler stands out of recycled mower blades so that as the pumpkin leaves grew, the sprinklers would be taller and be more effective in watering the pumpkin patch more evenly than in years' past.
The watering system worked great! By July, this is what the pumpkin patch looked like:
We worked together weeding it every week, and Josh did all the watering throughout the summer. By August, it looked like this:
Because of the warm weather we had so late into the early fall, by September some of our pumpkins were already turning orange. We began picking the ripe ones off the vines and putting them in storage in sheds. We grew 5 varieties of pumpkins, and I loved how colorful they looked together in the shed!
We opened for business the last 3 weekends in October. We were open Fridays and Saturdays from 11am to 5pm. We were blessed with really beautiful weather every day we were open! The pumpkin patch is a family project that we all work on together, and it's a good way to teach the boys how to work. Ammon mows lawns for people in the summer to earn money for his mission/college savings, so Jonah and Micah currently earn all the profits from the pumpkin patch for their mission/college savings. That's why I decided to call it the "Lil' Munchkins' Patch of Pumpkins" because it's all for our sons.
We grew about 500 pumpkins in the 1/4 acre patch. The weekend before we opened, we picked all the rest of the pumpkins off the vines and put them in piles in the patch and covered them before the first hard frost. Due to weather conditions, however, we had to throw about 100 away because they became rotten. It was unexpected, and we were saddened that we had to do that; we'd never had so many rotten pumpkins before. Because it stayed so warm so long this fall, we had to keep watering the vegetable garden along the perimeter of the patch, and since the pumpkin's leaves were so giant this year, the soil in a section of the patch was very damp, and the pumpkins sat too long in it, and they began having rot spots which spread through the pumpkin.
The friday morning of our opening weekend, we took the pumpkins out of the piles and spread them all over the patch. It was such a beautiful site to see all the pumpkins laying in the field!
Each year we are open, I like to add something new to the patch. Last year, we added the haybale maze. Edward (my father-in-law) built a new maze for us again this year! It's fun for the kids to run around in play in!
This year, there were a few additions to the patch. At the check-out area, we sold pumpkin pies that I'd made with pumpkins from the patch, and customers played a guessing game to win candy prizes for correctly guessing the weight of the largest 3 pumpkins we grew.
The largest pumpkin was 111 pounds! That's our biggest pumpkin we've grown yet! This is a photo of the biggest and tiniest pumpkin together!
And here's a photo of the boys hanging around the ginormous pumpkin!
Another new addition to the patch was the cinderella pumpkin carriage backdrop that I created. After stressing over the project for weeks, I was happy with the final product!
And we still had the guessing game where if you can guess the weight of your own pumpkin with 1 pound, you get 50 cents off. People were so excited when they guessed right! And we still had a seating area for families to take photos in. This year, we made it out of straw bales instead of regular benches:
We had really great sales this year. We piled the pumpkins into piles in the field each Saturday night until the following Friday, when we'd spread them all out in the field again.
By the final weekend we were open, we'd sold a majority of the pumpkins and the field starting looking more empty rather than mostly full:
And by the last weekend, sales had slowed down, so the boys and I spent a lot of alone time in the patch. To fill the the time, they played different activities. Jonah and Micah played in the wagons and wheelbarrows that they used to help carry pumpkins to customers' cars.
Ammon liked to hit some of the rotten ones with a golf club:
And Kanyon liked playing the nintendo by himself at the house when the rest of us were in the patch! Once in a while, he came down to visit and during one slow time when all four boys were around, I coerced them letting me take their picture!
When closing time came on the last day we were open, we only had 20 pumpkins left of the 400 that we could sell. We were so happy with sales this year! It was enjoyable for all of us! All of my favorite pumpkins in the patch got sold. I love funky pumpkins!
We only had one tall pumpkin this, which are Josh's favorite. Here's the Pumpkin grower with the tallest one we grew:
I love butt-crack pumpkins, and this year we had two:
This one was so adorable, it was all flat and bent over, and it looked to me like a kid pouting in time out!
This white one was in the shape of an apple! It was so unique!
We are already looking forward to next year's patch, and we're already talking about new ideas to include! We love doing the pumpkin patch! It's a great family project and it is so much fun!
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