Pumpkin Progress

I tried my hand at growing pumpkins in my backyard this summer in hopes to harvest the fruit and use in a batch of home brewed pumpkin ale this fall. I'm worried, though, about the plant actually bearing fruit. We're half way through August, have been getting some beautiful flower action, but no fruit yet. After WebMD-ing the state of my pumpkins in various pumpkin grower forums, it seems from the similar experience of others, lots of flower blooms, no big orange fruit, the soil may have too much nitrogen! There goes my thoughts of letting the luscious plants decompose right in the same spot to fertilize the soil for next year's go around. Because compost creates a nice quantity of nitrogen, I believe. I have a lot to learn and research about micro, urban gardening. 

It also seems my pumpkins may be suffering from what's called "powdery mildew" as it looks like the leaves have been dusted with baking soda. I can expect the leaves to start dying soon. Next door, on the other side of the fence, our neighbors have a little circular pool. Not a kiddie, wading pool, but not a big, big pool. But it's a pool, and I assume some chlorine. I wonder if some pool splashes seeped through the wooden fence gaps and coated the leaves, making them susceptible to some fungus spreading. But, before I go blaming neighbors for my pumpkin's disease, I learned in the forums that I should not have been watering the leaves themselves. And all through the summer I'd give them good splashes from the hose, thinking I was cooling them down, since they were sitting out in the hot sun burning like fair skinned Irish kids. But their outdoor activities caught them a variable case of athlete's foot that no fungus cream can treat. 

If I don't get any fruit, I can rest knowing that my plants probably created a smidgen of oxygen for our fine atmosphere. I learned that the average plant leaf creates approximately 5 mL of oxygen for every hour it is photosynthesizing. I counted about 100 leaves on my pumpkin vines which have taken over a stretch of my backyard. And let's say they're in the sun for maybe 8 hours a day? 11-7 at its angle. A good eight hour workday. 100 x 5mL x 8 =  4000 mL, or 4 liters! If my calculations are correct, my pumpkins are creating about two 2 liter bottles of oxygen a day. 

Next time you breathe, you could be sucking in a bit of my pumpkin's progress.

Bringing Home Small Pumpkins

Went apple picking today in Indiana but didn't find too many apples in the orchard, all picked over and some scattered on the ground, got to stump on a few and at least enjoy the pseudo outdoors and the sunshine. I ate 3 pumpkin donuts too many in a short amount of time and had a sugar crash. The Hen House Prowlers were playing bluegrass for the family folk, I know these guys, I know them as Sexfist, their other name from some Chicago shows. They were nice enough to let us record some live tracks awhile back for our Wood Sugars Inside the Barrel podcast.

We bought a tiny pumpkin for our cat Gus. I get a kick out of cutesy things like that.

Wicked tired today from a late night of chicken wings and sour beer, then hoppy beer with a good friend last night.

Was wicked tired last Sunday too, I failed to mention here about our Wood Sugars 4 shows in 24 hours last weekend. We of course had our Jokesmith Juggernauts on Fri Sept. 30th which was a good turn out but the comedy didn't seem to hit. It's okay, it happens. I hope the people were at least entertained and enjoyed their Friday night out. Saturday, Oct 1st we performed at the Ravenswood Art Walk at two different times, different places. At 11:45am we performed for 15min at their Main Stage. We had to substitute out the cuss words and ultimately performed for the beer booth guys, the sound guys, and a mom with two toddlers bopping around. I rehearsed my bits all the way there without the usual cussing. I was intensely nervous I'd let some f bombs slip like usual, but I was proud in the end to be a controlled performer. Then at 2pm we were under the impression we'd be performing in a theatre space but it was actually a wood shop. Wood Sugars in a wood shop, very fitting I do believe. It was actually the most fun I've had performing in a long time. We got about 5 or 6 random viewers, and were supposed to fill an hour. We're used to 15 min time slots, so we threw in some old sketches and did some improv to stretch it out. We popped some genuine chuckles out of our crowd.

Then we were asked to perform at a friend's house party, which we agreed to tentatively but an e-mail blast went out from the hostess that we'd be performing and we didn't want to be the dicks who backed out, even though Donny was hurting from what he thought was a cracked rib after a bike accident. It was actually pretty rad performing along with some other comedy folk in an apartment. It was cozy, almost salon style. I heard about a ghostly encounter from earlier that day in that very apartment. I dig hearing such things. Some people shotgunned their beers. I cheered them on and just drank my beer really fast, not chugging, not sipping. I got drunk and stayed out late. I don't do that enough anymore, but was reminded why it's not a usual thing for me when my wee hour AM bus route through Wrigleyville delayed me from catching the Belmont bus, within only a few seconds. And it was a 30 min wait for the next one. So I just walked, which I usually don't mind but I've been doing that a lot lately and my feet were tired. I thought about the novel I've been revising.  About to dive into another pass at it, and I'm feeling a slight nervousness. The piece I feel is getting close to being something swell, yet I feel like a blacksmith about to work on a bunch of small metals. A slight cabin fever type thing echoes around in me like the sensation of trying to put thread through the eye of a needle. Sometimes I get a kick out of digging into such tight focus on a task, yet sometimes I just want to work sloppily and spill my guts all over the place and not have to reshape it all into neat little piles.

I'm a slob with OCD.