Every year I lament about how our garden has been a flop, and I really shouldn’t given how well we seem to do with pumpkins and squash. Right now our garden (and much of our backyard) has been taken over by vines. We will have enough pumpkins and butternut squash to keep us in soup for a very long time. For some reason, I remember trying to grow pumpkins as being very difficult. Around here, it’s the only thing that we seem to be able to rely upon.

There are also dozens of these little green pumpkins about the size of a baseball:

I don’t think these will mature in time before the weather turns, but Rachel is excited to have them. She’s hoping to turn them into an ‘apple pie’ just as Ma Ingalls did in one of the Little House books (the Long Winter, maybe? I could be wrong on that.)

The more I think about 2020, the more I’ve been trying to focus on why this has been a good year. There have been enough reasons to write 2020 off, but instead of doing that I think I’d rather focus on why this year wasn’t just lost. We might not have the garden we want, but we’ve got the best pumpkin patch we’ve ever had, and we’re darn proud of it! One of these years we’ll have much more produce, but for now we’ll take the good things as they come and be grateful for them.