It’s June and that means pumpkin planting time is here again. Last year we harvested approximately 600 pumpkins sold them at our pumpkin ‘yard-sale’ at our house in Vestavia Hills. We’re calling it a yard-sale in case the police are reading this blog. We don’t want them to show up again unless they are buying pumpkins 
Last year we planted 500 seeds and this year we’re planting around 3,000. So when you get ready to buy your pumpkins this fall, we’ve got you covered. Our goal is to have our sale the first weekend in October at our house. We might (MIGHT) try to do a sale at the farm the weekend before and you’d actually come to the pumpkin patch and cut your own pumpkin- an authentic pumpkin patch. We hope the rains follow last summer’s pattern and we have another bumper pumpkin crop.
In June we also start to see baby chestnuts forming. As you can see from the two pictures, they look like something that might be found in the ocean. The green spiky things remind me of a sea anemone. In a couple months those soft rubbery nodules will turn into the equivalent of brown hypodermic needles protecting 3 chestnuts inside the burr hull.
I’ll be attending the annual Chestnut Growers of America conference in Stockton, California. My next post will focus on what I learned.
