Where are we now?: November 2007

Who are we??

Take a guess!!

(Maybe close ups will help.)

Carving pumpkins!

So we got our pumpkins from the farm and here we are, with our good friend Tyson, carving them up!! Happy Halloween!!

Our school really lives it up for spirit week. On crazy hair day the boys both had daddy shave thier initials into their heads. They got lots of laughs and they were even studying "J" in Kindergarten, so Jo was a star. Here he is playing on the playground.

He didn't even really want to shave it off when the day was over. We let him keep it until Saturday, after his soccer game.

Kindergarten fun

Come along, join the fun. I have been going to the pumpkin farm for seven years now on one field trip or another.... and honestly, I'm not crying that this will be the last!! Imagine this: Thursday wind storm. Very cold. Power out. All night. Sleep in living room. Greg is gone. All four of us one one mattress on the floor. Still no power. No shower. No hot water. Flo is visiting. And guess what! It's field trip day!!

So thus we have our own pumpkin vine from now on, and here is the glory of the day! It was really fun (for everyone but me!!)

pumpkin fest

Happy fall!! We would like to share with you the story of our pumpkins.

Every year we do something new in our garden, and this year we decided to do pumpkins. We thought since we were gone all summer, we could at least enjoy them when we got back. But when we came back in August, we found all our pumpkins looked like this

And they would just shrivel up. Shrivel, shrivel, shrivel, week after week after week! Finally we thought something must certainly be wrong and we checked the internet. Low and behold, we found out that there is a bee shortage nowadays and if your pumpkins were shriveling, it was likley because they were not polinated. Then, we learned some amazing things.

Did you know that pumpkin vines have both male and female flowers? The male flowers (like the one above) are ripe and open for a few days, waiting for the female flowers to open up (for only like an hour in the early morning.) At just that time, a bee needs to come along spread the pollen from the male to the female. So with no bees, the flowers were not being polinated and our pumpkins were shriveling!

So anybody needs to grow pumpkins if you need a reproductive lesson. The kids got busy with watching the flowers, spreading the pollen at just the right time, and guess what!