Lessons from the Vines: A Tour of This Year's Pumpkin Patch

Happy Thursday, friends! If you have a moment, grab a tall glass of iced tea and come visit with me in my pumpkin patch. There's no special message here today. Just a lovely moment for me to share something that brings me so much joy each summer, and how this year things have changed.

Our patch is going gang-busters this year. The  leaves are waist-high in the center. I have never seen such vigorous pumpkin plants in our yard before.

Let me show you the progress my plants are making.

As you can see, we have chicken wire around the base of the pumpkin patch. With squirrels, raccoons, and rabbits visiting our property daily, I needed to do something to protect the pumpkins.

The pumpkin seen through the chicken wire is a Spirit pumpkin. These make good cooking pumpkins, but also sometimes grow large enough (10 lbs or more) for carving. 

You'll notice this pumpkin is lighter in color than the Spirit one. This is a Ghost pumpkin and will have a white rind when ripe. I bought this plant on my birthday at Flower World, the large greenhouse complex we visited that day. I used birthday money from last year's birthday. I can't think of any better birthday gift than a pumpkin plant that I can watch grow and produce fun and tasty pumpkins over several months.

This is our mystery pumpkin. I have a few growing very similar to this. I had some seeds I'd saved from a purchased carving pumpkin. I planted those seeds to see what would grow. These pumpkins or squash are elongated and look like they'll be large. Whatever it is, it's likely a hybrid between a couple of varieties, the carving pumpkin variety that I purchased and whatever it crossed with in the field. It could be tasty, or it could be awful. In any case, it should make a good decoration this fall.

At the back of the patch I have a trellis for pole beans. The pumpkin plants' height has shaded out the green bean plants. They're still there. They just haven't climbed up the trellis. If you look closely at the photo above you see a pumpkin vine climbing the trellis. I'm going to just let it climb. I can secure and suspend any pumpkins that develop to the trellis when/if they appear. Otherwise, the trellis will provide a vertical space for this plant to grow. It will climb up the back side and then back down the front.

At the very front of the patch I have 3 zucchini plants. Situated at the front, I can reach over the chicken wire fence to harvest zucchini as we want them. Wednesday's dinner featured zucchini pancakes. I packed 3 up for one daughter who stopped by this afternoon. She's cat-sitting for the next week. I can tell you she really appreciated that I had the zucchini cakes ready to go for her so she would have less she needed to cook for herself tonight.

So, it's mid-July now. My plants will complete setting fruits by early to mid-August. I currently have 17 small pumpkins/winter squash that look like they'll make it to maturity. That's a few more than I ended up with last year. We'll have to wait and see how many I end up with at the end of this summer.

I mentioned at the top that the pumpkin patch is doing better than any other year. Why is that? In mid-spring this year, my husband, daughters and I turned over all of the soil in the patch. I had thought to rent a rototiller, but I'm too cheap. We have several shovels and 4 adults, so . . . After digging up all of the soil I hauled every last morsel of our home-made compost from the last year to the patch. I think I had a little over a cubic yard of compost, which for a small-ish patch, is pretty good. I bought several bags of composted chicken manure, with which I topped the home-grown compost. The four of us shoveled the compost and manure into the existing soil. I wasn't done yet, though. I topped all of the turned soil with new garden soil to suppress weeds borne from the home-grown compost.

In years past I've purchased compost to add to the garden in general and the pumpkin patch in specific. Purchased compost is great for altering the texture of the soil. The drawback to purchased compost is it is frequently heat-treated for sterilization. Those high temperatures kill off some of the beneficial microbes. In contrast, most homegrown compost matures at a lower temperature and is teaming with life, a vibrant and diverse community of native microorganisms that promote soil health.

In addition to the pumpkin leaves growing taller and experiencing a higher fruit set this year, I've also notice the plants need less water than last year. I think the soil is holding water better than previous years. At the very least, we'll save money on the water bill. At the most, we could harvest more and larger pumpkins and squash this year as the plants have more of the essentials that they need.

Did the addition of all of last year's homegrown compost make the difference in the pumpkin patch this year? I don't really know. It's the one variable that changed from one year to the next. I will say that I'm motivated to improve the soil in the rest of our garden beds in the coming years.

We've experienced something of this nature twice before in our gardening, both times with edible plants. One year we dumped all of our homegrown compost around the base of a newly-planted hedge to hold in moisture for the small plants. Our of the compost grew a few acorn squash plants that loaded us down with 48 acorn squash by the end of the summer. The other instance was when we were building up a low area in our yard for our blueberry bushes. We used all of a year's homegrown compost layered with soil from the yard to build that spot. Those blueberry bushes really took off and produced substantially more berries beginning a year after transplant.

Good soil makes a huge difference when growing edibles. The native soil in my area is not inherently good. According to our neighborhood geologist, our properties sit on a glacial deposit field. The soil itself is low in organic matter, has a hardpan layer just a few inches below the topsoil, and features a chaotic mix of clay, sand, silt, gravel, and large rocks. It's naturally inhospitable to vegetable gardening. When combined with the 50 footers all around my neighborhood casting shade everywhere, it's a wonder so many of us in my neighborhood even bother with vegetable gardening. We're optimists, I guess.

There's something very nostalgic about the pumpkin patch. We are reminded of county fairs, autumn festivals, warming spiced pies, and charming porch decorations. They are provision for the upcoming winter months. Pumpkins serve as an anchor for autumn traditions and sensory memories. They evoke feelings of simpler times of family life and our agricultural roots. On a sunny summer afternoon, I can take a stroll out to the pumpkin patch and travel momentarily to a time our hurried modern life has forgotten. It's my special place for summer joy.

Thank you for visiting my pumpkin patch today. Now it's time for me to get back into the kitchen and start on the pile of dishes!


What comes to your mind when you think of pumpkins? Do you have any family traditions involving pumpkins? Are there pumpkin fields nearby that the public can visit in fall? Are you a pumpkin pie lover or a pumpkin pie hater?

Frugality in the Age of Automated Consumption

image: Kindel Media on Pexels

Frugality doesn't just feel harder because we're battling inflation, but it's also more troublesome at this time because we are fighting Silicon Valley's smartest software engineers.

Not too long ago, having a no-spend week simply meant not going to a store. When catalogs with 1-800 phone numbers hit the scene, temptation to spend became a little more difficult to deal with. But still, we could put that catalog down, throw it away, or ask to be taken off the mailing list. 

In retail design, anything that slows a customer down when making a purchase is called friction. Friction impedes consumer purchasing and reduces business profits. In the age of automated consumption, digital engineers have created "frictionless spending." 

It's really somewhat insidious when you think about it. Predictive algorithms, AI, and one-click checkout are entirely designed to get the customer to click buy now before we can stop ourselves and think through a purchase.

If you have ever struggled with purchasing more than you deep-down wanted, you realize that we are at war here. It is us, the consumers, against the digital engineering of retail merchants. 

So what are some examples of engineered frictionless spending?

The One-Click Trap

As I mentioned above, one-click checkout, where your information and credit card are "kept on file" for your convenience. You enter your email address and all of the fields are filled for you, including the last 4 digits of your credit card. All you have to do to make that purchase is click. In the purchaser's mind, One-Click purchasing speeds past the moment when you pull your credit card out of your wallet and have to read and enter the number. Brief as this moment might be, it still slows you down and gives you a minute to evaluate if you really want to make this purchase.

The Solution to One-Click

• You can reintroduce friction on any of the websites you use, from retail to food delivery platforms. Simply delete your saved credit card information from those sites and apps.  
• If you do most of your purchasing on your phone, you can delete the apps and force yourself to shop via your desktop. Apps are designed to be quick and easy -- open the app, make your selection, one-click and you're done. Using the website on your desktop or laptop requires you to be at your computer, navigate to the site, and then initiate a purchase.
• On many sites you can also enable Two-Step Verification or Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) through your account settings with each site. By necessitating a second form of verification that you are who you say you are, you introduce friction and slow each purchase down long enough to think through.

Predictive Algorithms and Retail Surveillance

This borderlines on creepy. I'm sure you've experienced this. You spend some time on one website looking at products. Then for the next several days or weeks you notice ads for those products or very similar ones popping up wherever you browse or read online. You can be on a news website, and the ads that reflect your previous window shopping will pop up. Beyond surveillance, e-commerce algorithms track how long and fast you scroll and the time you're online. If the scrolling is taking place at a time studied to coincide with average consumer low willpower, targeted and highly personalized ads will display right at that moment.

The Solution to Digital Big Brother

• Turn off "Personalized Ads" in Google, Apple, and social media settings.
• Clear browser cookies frequently or use one of the privacy-focused browsers like DuckDuckGo or Brave.
• Resist the temptation to "heart" or save items to a digital wishlist. Indicating that you like these items opens the floodgates to targeted ads that say "price dropped" or "only 1 left!"

The Subscription-ization of Everything

What can't you get on subscription these days? We get our rancher-direct beef with a subscription plan. The plan allows us to get a better price than if we ordered when we wanted more. We do buy more beef than we would otherwise, likely spending more overall on meat for our household. Subscriptions rely on the "set and forget" mentality. The one positive, though, is we share the extra beef with our son and daughter-in-law. 

My husband and I don't subscribe to any paid streaming services, but one of our daughters does from time to time. Many streaming subscribers find they "super-watch" shows or movies in the first month, and then the amount of watching dwindles until they aren't even using the subscription in some months. And yet, they are paying for the availability of the service every month. 

Do you remember the height of the meal kit subscription boom? It seemed like a lot of folks were trying them out. And why not? It's convenient. They're delivered on a regular schedule. Everything has been pre-thought out for you. Oh, yeah -- the cost. On a strict financial basis, meal kits cost  about double what scratch-cooking from grocery store ingredients cost.

The Solution: The Burn and Rebuild Audit

This is a radical method for determining what you truly need for harmony in your life. It's a little bit like figuratively walking away from that shopping cart on Amazon to see if you truly want all of the items. Once the service is removed, it becomes obvious whether or not that subscription added value to your life.

• Instead of canceling one or two subscriptions at a time (if you have many), cancel only the non-essential ones. And remember, you get to decide what is essential and what is not.
• Then as you go, resubscribe individually when you find that the lack of that particular subscription is causing friction in your life.

Ultimately, mastering modern thrift is no longer just about clipping coupons or shopping special sales. In the digital age, we need to be aware of the engineered traps embedded into our online shopping. By reintroducing friction into our shopping experience and blindfolding the algorithms, we regain our consumer control. When we turn off the automated consumption machine, we save money, yes, but equally important, we gain peace of mind and financial clarity.

For those of us who pay for subscriptions, I want to put out a challenge to give a fair assessment to whether or not the subscriptions are adding value to your life. For those here who keep their credit info on sites where you shop for non-essentials, would withdrawing that info create a hardship for you, or would it improve your financial clarity? Do you ever ask yourself if all of this "convenience" is really benefitting us? And to clarify, I'm not anti-consumerism. I am pro-conscious choice consumerism.