Single Orange Female

or Single Orange Male. It's hard to tell the sex of a plant. Also titled, "Another day in my strange garden." Every once in awhile, a strange plant erupts among my gardens. There is something about watching a struggling, often unattractive, living thing try to make its way out of the soil and into the air that amazes me. So much so that I have a hard time pulling it out or chopping it down. Who am I to snuff out a life that obviously so wants to live? I call these, "Jolly Green Giant" plants because they are often humongous. So when the SOF erupted out of nowhere, I just watched it grow, and grow and grow. This one wasn't as much tall as it was wide. Boy did it spread. It was becoming a problem as it was encroaching on my driveway and I kept running it over with the car. One day I came home and my husband had tied this mammoth plant back so that I wouldn't drive on it (my husband has resigned himself to the fact that I don't like to dislodge these strange spirited beings).

One day I was admiring this plant with a friend. "It seems to want to be something," I said. "It keeps blooming these beautiful yellow flowers but nothing seems to come of them." Then my friend said something that rocked my world. "It looks like a pumpkin plant." What???!!! How could a pumpkin plant suddenly grow outside my front door?? Then I remembered the pumpkins. Last Halloween, I dutifully put out my 2 pumpkins, one for each child. There they sat, day after day, week after week, until one day, they were nothing more than rotting corpses. Oh, so they left their seeds that germinated. Cool! But why don't I have little baby pumpkins? "The plant needs another plant to fertilize it," my friend said. Boy, was I getting an education in plant sex ed. It needs a mate?? Who knew? So, consider this a dating advertisement - Wanted: Single pumpkin plant willing to commit!