Pumpkin Plant Update

As of late, the pumpkin plant has been flowering on and off.

Pumpkin Plant

Noticed what you see in this photo  at the beginning of August in our garden.  To me, the leaves look like those of  a pumpkin plant which was interesting to me since I don't remember planting any pumpkin seeds last year. While noticing all this our neighbor Steve was walking up the alley. I called him over asking him if he knew what a pumpkin plant looks like.  He said he did. He looked at the plant and said that if it wasn't pumpkin it was some other kind of squash. I told him it had to be pumpkin since I had some small pumpkins in the planters that were on this side of the house last fall. The squirrels had eaten the pumpkins and a seed must've dropped over the planter's edge.

Steve said that the actual pumpkin would grow where you see the bud in the above picture. I'm excited! We've got our own little pumpkin patch! Now - how to keep those rascally squirrels away?!

Scooby Doo

One of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons from childhood, Scooby Doo, has to be one of the longest running and most successful animated series ever. The show began in 1969 so I was quite young when I started watching it. The show featured four teenage characters - Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy,  - and their lovable Great Dane, Scooby Doo. Although the show didn't specifically deal with Halloween, the gang always solved mysteries involving what were thought to be supernatural entities including zombies, ghosts, phantoms, and other ghouls - things I associated with the holiday. The show was a lot of fun because of the hijinks and mayhem involved with solving the mysteries, but also because of the spookiness involved. I remember seeing a zombie on the show and asking Mom exactly what a zombie was. She said it had something to do with voodoo. And a witch doctor reanimating a dead body through magic. The zombie was under the control of the reanimator since the zombie had no will of its own. More recently in pop culture the zombie state was caused by a person being infected with a virus causing them to want to eat flesh and brains. More recently still, the zombie is the victim of a pandemic illness.