This marks the third year in which I have had dedicated space at home for a garden. It’s a humble little plot, an honest 20 square feet (and a much less honest 40 or so square feet when the plants decide to sprawl themselves out). I also had the opportunity to have a second garden with an even less honest square footage, oftentimes growing into brambles and patches of apathetic thorny weeds.

I mostly planted pumpkins this year.

Last year, my roommate and I received a big, gnarly pumpkin from some friends. It was a solid 20+ pound beast. The skin was pale with a thin, crawling overlay of orange. We named it “the Freddy Krueger pumpkin” for its skin texture. This bad boy lasted for a couple months in our apartment without rotting until I cut it up to harvest the seeds and flesh. We also received a second pumpkin, similar to the Freddy Krueger pumpkin but less textured and less crawling on the skin. We aptly named this “the one that wasn’t Freddy Krueger.”

I saved both the Freddy Krueger and the not-Freddy Krueger seeds for this year’s growing season and planted a couple of each in both my home garden and secondary garden. Then I returned to Platteville for my summer job.

The next time I visited home, the pumpkins had not grown to be something to make a deal about. They were growing like anything else, basking in the sun and taking whatever space they needed.

But then, towards the end of the growing season, when I visited home, I did not find a garden. I found a haven. The pumpkins had grown. A lot. It was amazing to observe how their vines did not tangle much, and when they did their tendrils link like clasped hands supporting one another. The innocuous seeds I planted months ago displayed pumpkins of burnt red, orange, pale yellow, whitish, and deep, dark green colors.

I visited my secondary garden, too, and found the same result. The pumpkins grew wherever they could. Sometimes they blanketed over smaller growing plants and sometimes they crept underneath taller growing plants. They still produced the colorful display.

As odd as it may sound, I felt a deep connection to my pumpkins. I used a handful of seeds that produced more than a dozen handfuls of pounds of pumpkin. I couldn’t believe how they were so prolific. The colors were marvelous, the variety was astounding, and the shapes were perplexing. And they taste good, too. Nothing quite beats some good ol’ roasted pumpkin.

I think I’ll plant some more pumpkins next year.