To everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season..

After Halloween we saved the seeds from the pumpkin, thinking we'd toast them up for snacks. However, embarassingly, we haven't done the proper steps to getting our oven to work yet.

So the seeds sat in the refrigerator for over a week until I figured there was no way I'd be feeding them to the kids.

Impulsively I tossed the big pile of seeds into a large pot and dumped some potting soil on top of them. Two days later the pot exploded with pumpkin sprouts! You can see the pumpkin seeds, to give you a sense of perspective.

The kids and I think this is awesome. The sprouts below were growing so hard they were pushing the dirt and the sprouts above up and out of the pot.

I assumed that everything grew so quickly here thanks to the usual desert pattern of life, with a short wet time and chance to grow. As these pumpkin seeds (and these kids) are from the USA, I think maybe there's more to it...

Yesterday I moved the top layer of sprouts to another pot to uncover the swelling masses of more pumpkin plants below. Here is this morning.

Hmmm...at how much a kg for orange pumpkins, I could have myself a booming home business...unfortunately there isn't much of a market for carving pumpkins at Christmastime.