Look at all these weird pumpkins we accidentally grew...

It's fall and that means it's time to harvest all the pumpkins I didn't actually plant. Yep, so fountain. These pumpkins were a total accident. You guys know I've been growing the classic Florida heirloom seminal pumpkins for years. Well, two years ago I grew a pumpkin from the island of Grenada that was a black bumpy pumpkin that I happen to have some seeds for and I tried to grow the variety out. Now, I didn't know that it was a Cucurbito Machata which is the same variety, the same species, not the same variety, but the same species as seminal pumpkin which means they could interbreed. I didn't know that. I tried to grow some of the seeds out and I didn't have very much luck. I got one pumpkin that disappeared and I had one good looking pumpkin that looked just like the black bumpy pumpkin that I had started with. However, I grew them right back here and I also had some seminal pumpkins most of which had started themselves because they tend to do that. If there's any pumpkins laying around in the fall where they can rot into the ground, leave a few seeds, they come back up again and I had planted them in my compost piles too. Just every time we'd eat some we'd throw some of the seeds in there along with the rinds and everything and just let them rot down and I knew they would come back. So I had some mounds back here with them in it. Well anyhow, they got together because I saved the seeds from that black pumpkin and I went out there to my field and I planted them. Well those pumpkins came out really interesting and strange looking. They were deliberately planted and I called them zombie pumpkins. They're a seminal cross with a tropical grenadian pumpkin. However, I didn't really get to do as much in the grocery row garden this year. I did quite a bit in the spring and then just kind of let it go and I noticed there were some pumpkin vines in here and I assumed they were probably just seminal pumpkins again. But what we ended up with was some sort of crosses. There's a few in here that look like pure seminal pumpkins but most of them are some sort of wild looking, sometimes bumpy, sometimes these big oblong spotted ones. They're a cross and the seminal pumpkins that restarted themselves I guess are actually now involved genetically with that black pumpkin. But I never thought we would get this kind of variety and these look different from the ones that I planted out there that turned out to be crosses that all came from the black pumpkin. These all came from seminal pumpkin mothers. Those all came from the black pumpkin mothers but they're both crosses of seminal pumpkin along with that grenadian pumpkin because those are the only two varieties that I grew and these were literally a weed in the garden this year. You know, I didn't decide to put pumpkins back in here like this pumpkin. We gained a lot of size on some of them. I mean the seminal pumpkins that we grew are only about that big. We gained a lot of size. They're actually bigger than the original. Here's a really weird one. Let me show you another one. I've been waiting on this one. Here's a cross. This one is extremely bumpy but it has mostly the orange of a seminal but they get this white blush which the black pumpkin had a white blush to it but it was mostly black with a white blush and now we've got this white blush. It's not mold. It's actually part of it. A white blush on a bumpy bizarre seminal pumpkin cross. That is really interesting. Now the thing that I noticed is that the flavor of these pumpkins, the ones that we've actually eaten so far, the zombie cross version, is superior to the original black pumpkin and it has been superior to the seminal pumpkin line that we had. So if that holds true for these which had a seminal pumpkin mother or multiple seminal pumpkin mothers, this could be really good but maybe we're kind of ending up with a land race of weird, it's like the caribbean seminal crosses. Holy moly, look at this one. Look at the size of that. Now I didn't even know this was over here until we started doing this video. I just walked around the corner and here is a pumpkin that is massive. Looks like she's got dirt on it. It's totally intact. I wonder how much that weighs. That is the biggest seminal pumpkin ever. Look, that's insane. That is really cool. So this is probably hybrid vigor that made it so big but obviously there was some pretty interesting genetics coming in from the Caribbean. My guess is that it had so many different pumpkin varieties it was not a stable line at all. It was a whole bunch of different ones mixed together. Now I'm just gonna go and look at every mound around here and see if there's another one sticky in it. That has been buried under weeds. We had velvet beans in here and sweet potatoes and other things that pretty much grew themselves. I had originally started by putting a few rows of peppers in here but life got out of control and whole thing got eaten by velvet beans which I had grown them in here for a nitrogen fixer the previous year and I left some seeds and they ate the area but I did not expect that. I didn't expect to see one that big. One from our original seminal line. That's what they normally look like. It's not a record like the other one but it's pretty good looking. That's a pretty pumpkin. That's a that's a good fall decoration right there. That's pretty good. This one looks like a seminal. This one looks a lot like the original black one I had with more of a gray blush on it. there but here's the pile of tropical pumpkins crossed with seminal pumpkins that we did not plant. This is just from the debris that was around the edges of the garden where we had raked up last year's garden vines and leaves and everything and from ones that just showed up inside of the grocery row gardens we got probably probably 300 pounds maybe give or take 50 pounds probably about 300 pounds of pumpkins and they're beautiful. I've never seen colors like this and of course they didn't have problems with pests or disease or insects. We lost a few here and there but the vigor of a Caribbean variety mixed with the vigor of a seminal variety gave us something very very interesting so this will be what we just grow out. It's kind of our wild land race I guess. Some of them still look like the pure seminals some of them look a little bit more like the original black one that we started with a little more like that which is kind of turning to the blue white now but if you grow the plants that like your climate and you let the ones that plant themselves or the ones that survive survive instead of intervening with I mean these were not irrigated these were not sprayed these were not even fertilized they just grabbed whatever I guess was in the compost pile or in the ground and they ran and ran and ran so this is what you want so if you're trying to figure out what grows in your area just plant a bunch of stuff and then whatever lives and starts to become an invasive weed on your property is probably what was supposed to be there. I'm very excited about these pumpkins that I didn't grow on purpose and that the Grocery Row Garden System is so alive that it can host plants that I didn't even deliberately plant that it's going to be interesting eating our way through these pumpkins over the next 10 years and seeing how they taste and probably we'll put some seeds up for anybody that wants to experiment with it but we do have a cross called the zombie pumpkin which is a bumpier version that those were the ones that had actually the black pumpkin mother these all had a seminal pumpkin mother but they're they're still the cross of genetics very interesting very very interesting thanks for joining me I'll be catching up with you all soon be sure to check out Joseph Lofthouse's book Land Race Gardening if you get a chance to and if you want to learn more about really simple easy gardening check out my book Minimalist Gardening and if you're ever in Atmore Alabama come and see us at Atmore Farm and Garden which is our feed and seed store that we are in and I've been very busy with and we've added machetes and food forest plants a lot of other things that you don't normally see in a little small town feed and seed but it's been a lot of fun and I've already met some of you guys over there so come and see me Atmore Farm and Garden and until next time may your thumbs always be green