5000 pounds of manure costs 90 dollars

That's not necessarily something I thought I would ever know, but now I do.

On Saturday, we made the pumpkin patch a reality. There's a lot of pictures, so I'm putting them all on this flickr page. The photos are in chronological order starting at the bottom of the page, because I really can't figure out how to work flickr. Does anybody else have a site they like for posting photo albums or want to give me a flickr tutorial?

Needless to say, Saturday was a great day. In the morning, Andrew and I went down to St. Louis Composting with the trailer we rented from Ango Rentals and picked up 5 cubic yards of composted manure. It's a rich, black, steamy compost of straw and poop that's been allowed to forment for months and months.

Once we got back to the Danforth Center with the manure, we went and picked up a big ole' tiller from the Home Depot. Andrew and his dad Jim were there with me, and we just about killed ourselves. The patch was full of clay and rocks and it took us a while to get started. When we started out, the tiller had a terrible tendency to just sort of skip over the surface and take us with it. We had to get a lot of weight over the business end of the tiller, the tines, to get them to dig in. Once we broke ground, we just had to slowly work our way out from the center, until we'd gotten around the whole patch. Brian, who works in Dr. Beachy's lab at the Danforth Center, was helping and mostly, he and I went around and picked out the big rocks while Jim drove the tiller. Andrew had to take off early to go to his friend Jessica's wedding. Mom and Dad showed up and brought some much needed sandwiches.

Anyway, once the ground was all broken up, we pulled the trailer full of composted manure into the patch and spread it around, then tilled it in. That part was sorta gross. It definitely got very warm in the patch when we spread around all that hot manure. But by the end (around 8:00), it was worth it. We have a big patch of good loose, black earth, and it seems like a place where something might actually grow.

As I've noted before, it's going to be a great summer.

So it's not exactly tomorrow...

But then again, what is?

Here are some pictures of the pumpkins.

They were taken a few days ago.

Tomorrow is a momentous event that will warrant the taking of pictures and the creation of a new post.

Here is the announcement of that event, followed by some new pictures. The announcement was sent out to everyone here at the center, but if you're reading this, consider yourself invited.

Hi everyone,

Tomorrow, Saturday, May 20, 2006 will be a momentous day in the sport of giant pumpkin growing. Starting at noon, the Danforth Center Humongous Pumpkin Club will be breaking ground on our pumpkin patch. If you, your friends, your neighbors, or your family would like to help weed whack, shovel, till, fertilize, or just stand around and have a cold beverage and a chat while watching horticultural history in the making, then this is the event for you.

We’ll be out behind the loading dock from noon until we’re done. There will be food and cold drink. There will be song and maybe dance. Hopefully, there will be you.

Humongously,

Bert Berla

P.S. If you would like to bring along food, drinks, garden tools, lawn chairs, etc, that would be great as well. Or, if you have a tiller at your disposal, that would be great, too, as it would save us the rental fee from Home Depot.


And the pictures:

Things are humming along nicely

So, it's a little bit of a slow time, now, a good time for relaxing. The pumpkins are growing nicely in the greenhouse, their roots are developing. We're keeping them happy, but not too happy - we need to make them work a little bit so that the roots develop, or later on they won't be able to suck up all the nutrition they need to get really giant.

But this week, things are really going to get started. I've got a pallet or so of extra organic material from the plant growth facility, and a plan. Next Saturday, we're going to get the earth ready. We're gonna dig out the sod, dump all that nasty grass, and till all that good fertilizer into the ground. We're gonna take those plants outside and let them take off. I have to tell you, I'm really starting to swell up with pride here.

But not so fast... taking a pumpking outside is something a grower has to do one step at a time. Growing in a greenhouse, our young plants haven't been exposed to much UV light, and they haven't developed the waxy cuticle it needs to protect itself from the sun's harmful rays. Without that waxy coating on the leaves, the very light that should nourish the plant could simply overload it and destroy the photosynthetic machinery. So we'll take it slow. We'll take our little friends outside a few hours at a time, and give them the chance to get ready and thicken up their skin before we push them out into the big, bad world.

By next weekend, our little plants should be ready to take that world by storm.

I'll post more pictures tomorrow... be sure to check back.

2 out of 3 ain't bad...

Well, the moment has finally arrived. There's no turning back now. They're growing, and they're not going to stop.

On Saturday, I planted 3 enormous seeds. By Tuesday, 2 gigantic little pumpkin vines were poking up out of the soil. I can't tell you all the things I'm feeling right now. But, I'll try to give you a partial list: joy, trepidation, hope, dreaminess, fear, intimidation, etc.



There they are, ladies and gentlemen, harlots, and scoundrels, boys and girls: pumpkins. They may not look like much now, but just to give you an idea of scale, those are in 12” (30 cm) pots. This picture should give you a better idea of scale.



That makes the span of the two cotyledons (hold on) approximately 15 cm. Cotyledons are also known as 'seed leaves' they sit, basically fully formed, inside the seed, awaiting germination, and then they expand out of the seed coat and unfold to begin collecting sunlight and the energy necessary for growth. The pumpkin has 2 of them, which makes it a dicot – the other major group of angiosperms, or flowering plants, is the monocots, like corn and grasses, which have only one cotyledon. They'll fall off quickly once the real leaves start to develop, but the role they're playing now, at the start, while the first leaves develop and the root system starts to well, take root, is critical.

On a related note, I'd like all my friends out there in Pumpkin Land to give big ups to Sarah H., a member in excellent standing of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center Ridiculously Humongous Pumpkin Club, who is taking care of the big pumpkins this weekend while I'm in the big apple visiting Eric for the Five Boro Bike Tour. I'm sure she'll do an excellent job of providing them with the food, water, and encouragement they so critically need at this pivotal time.

I'd like to end this with a picture of some pumpkin plants looking pimp, in honor of Eric.