The meteoric rise, and collapse, of the giant pumpkin

So last weekend, with the help of Mike's dental school friends, we installed the big giant pumpkin on the front stoop, completing our fall decorations.  Sadly, this lovely fall scene only lasted a week.  When we went out on Saturday morning, the pumpkin looked like this:

 Which quickly devolved to this by the afternoon:

 And now looks like this:

It's a sad, smelly sight.  So far, neither of us has been brave enough to tackle the removal, although we realize that the situation is only going to get worse.  We did have a lovely stoop for a week, at least, and the smaller giant pumpkin is still in good shape so all is not lost. 

Even though we were very sad about the collapse of the giant pumpkin, we still managed to get through some good garden work on Sunday.  As I've mentioned before, our chard has been incredibly productive for the last three months.  I never thinned the seedlings, though, and so the bed is very unruly.  When Mike harvested a bunch of chard for visiting friends on Saturday, he told me that he thought that most of our good chard was gone.  I figured that this probably wasn't true, but could admit that the overgrown and bug eaten leaves were overshadowing the good chard, so on Sunday morning I thinned out the chard bed.

 

Overgrown chard bed

Newly invigorated thinned chard bed

Clearly, we still have quite a bit of good chard left, and the bed looks much better now that I've removed the leaves that had gone by.  While I worked on chard maintenance, Mike fixed up the gate to the garden.  Lily the wonder squirmer has perfected the art of slithering under the gate to feast on the compost, and I begged Mike to do something to prevent her from getting in so often.  On Friday and Saturday, she pulled out and ate a broccoli stem, coffee filter with grounds, half a gourd, a carrot, and what looked like a pepper.  Can you tell she's a lab?  So Mike decided to lower the gate and put wire behind it so that she couldn't squeeze between the bars.  It took him at least an hour, and he was very confident in his work.

Lily, honey badger that she is, was undaunted.  About 15 minutes after we went inside for a break, I looked out to see Lily happily noshing away at the compost.  Apparently she took one look at the new gate and decided that it would be even easier to just push her nose through the side, which opens the gate just enough for her to squeeze through.  While we're happy that at least one of our dogs appears to be intelligent, we were not pleased that the redesign had not worked.  So now the gate is both latched shut with a caribeener and then tied tightly with rope.  So far, she hasn't figured out a way to get in, but it seems like it's only a matter of time.

After Mike and I were done with our respective garden jobs, we teamed up to plant a bed of garlic, to be harvested next summer.  Since I did such a sub-par job with the onions, I let Mike do the actual planting work, while I separated the cloves.  It feels good to have now three beds of the garden already set for next year (garlic, asparagus, and rhubarb), and soon I'm going to start planning out the rest of the garden for next summer.

Before our last frost, Mike had harvested a lot of peppers, and while he was brewing a batch of winter ale yesterday afternoon he multitasked by also blackening the peppers on the grill.  We had a mix of bell peppers and poblanos, and he blackened them all.  We're going to chop them up and freeze them for chilis this winter.

We've both been doing quite a bit of chicken socialization lately, so we stopped by the coop to say hello to the girls and have another conversation about where it is, and is not, appropriate to lay eggs.  I had a real connection with a few girls, and I like to think my words made a difference because this morning we had our first nest box egg!  So at least one of our chickens is smart enough to figure out that those straw filled comfy boxes are for laying.  We had two more eggs on the floor, but progress is progress.